Endurance

by Dermot Somers

  Whether he was assessing the amount of material Ussher had, or whether the library had already been scoured for fugitive saints, Michael O’Clery spent no more than a week in Dublin. Presumably he dressed in secular clothes without distinction. He certainly did not move around town in a long brown robe and sandals, with a cord around his waist and his hair in a Franciscan tonsure. Glancing around the National Library today, over a rampart of O’Clery’s Annals, it is tempting to imagine him as pale faced, lightly bearded, thin haired, with a tendency towards dandruff; a little stooped perhaps, and with that inner focus in the eye that responds to print rather that to human intercourse. But this is to forget the outdoor implications of his nickname, Tadhg an tSléibhe. Considering too the project he was to mastermind, he must have had authority, force of will, and above all, endurance. In fact, it is difficult to place him in a library at all.

  TORN PAGES

  O’Clery moved on from Dublin to Drogheda, where he stayed in a Franciscan house, or a convent as they were often called. It had recently been re-established there, along with a school for religious teaching. These would soon be closed down after the demolition of the house in Cook Street. A chunk from a copy of the Book of Leinster was sent after him from Dublin to Drogheda, and he copied material from it, as he recorded in a note:

  …as bloidh do sheinliubhar tainic a hÁth Cliath don Droichet do sccríobadh, 6 Auguist, 1627.

  The habit of giving dates in English, which is noticeable in Donegal Irish today, has a long tradition.

  Ten leaves from this actual book, itself a copy, were sent on to Louvain afterwards, where such treasures were being collected. Does this mean that Brother Michael was tearing pages out of books? Unlikely, though he must have been tempted. It is difficult not to be reminded of the Buddhist manuscripts and ancient texts that leaked their way out of Tibet as the Chinese Revolution was burning its way across the country. Some went abroad for safekeeping to the equivalent of Louvain. Many others were sold or destroyed. Curiously, ten vellum pages of the original Book of Leinster are held today in the Franciscan Library, in Killiney, Co. Dublin, while the rest are in Trinity College. Ten pages seems to be the Franciscan share.

  It was probably at that point that O’Clery darted across to Kildare, where he copied an ancient text known as the Martyrology of Tallaght, a calendar of Saints’ Days dating from the ninth century. Much of the original text is now missing but the blanks have been filled in from his transcription. There are other instances in which his copies provide the contents of lost material. The Annals themselves draw on four texts which would otherwise be completely lost.

  BUNDROWES

  Returning to base, he worked there for the winter on the material he had gathered. Presumably he had other duties as a lay brother in the community, wherever its cluster of thatched huts lurked among the woods and the swampy ground about Lough Melvin. His older brother, Bernardinus, was appointed head of that community and he undoubtedly recognised the importance of the scribal work, since he remained in charge till the very end. In fact, it is possible that the entire structure there was designed to further the Louvain project.

  Bundrowes, a ford on the River Drowes, a little south of Bundoran, had always been a noted crossing point, a narrow funnel between Sligo and Donegal. Although Irish monasteries throughout history had occupied such focal points in the landscape, it is unlikely that the Donegal Franciscans in the late 1620s were jumping up and down to attract English attention. The native Irish in the area were remnants of MacClancy’s people, described forty years before, by Francisco de Cuéllar with amiable intent as ‘savages’. There must have been people within a stone’s throw of Michael O’Clery who remembered the Spaniards and even de Cuéllar himself. Sadly, the entire Armada is reduced in the Annals of the Four Masters to fifteen lines of distant and impersonal description, and there is nothing to counterpoint de Cuéllar’s famous letter.

  HOLY FICTIONS

  O’Clery was on the road again in late February 1628, when he stayed in a Franciscan house in Athlone, before making his roundabout way to Dublin for a second visit. It is delicately hinted by scholars that the Latin transcriptions he made in Dublin in July are poor. This might be superiority on the part of commentators who never ate fewer than three meals a day themselves. On the other hand, it might be true, in which case we can sympathise with Michael O’Clery and even grow fond of him.

  Whatever about his classical education, Brother Michael was smart enough to know the difficulty of his task and to realise his own limitations. He acknowledged that he intended to visit a leading scholar in Tipperary to get help with the difficult parts of Cáin Adamnáin, an ancient text which exempts women from war and deals with offences such as rape. This set of seventh-century laws also deals with the treatment of non-combatants, such as children and priests.

  Despite his fidelity to Louvain, he seems to have had his suspicions about hagiography – the literature of the lives of saints. He has been mocked for giving credence to absurdities such as floating stones and a saint aged four hundred and thirteen, but it is easy to understand his being numbed by anachronism as he struggled in a flood of holy fictions.

  From Dublin, he travelled southeast in autumn, through Wicklow and Carlow, and across to Cashel in Tipperary. His research in Wicklow has always carried a puzzling hint of scandal because of a note he jotted down in relation to some poems copied at Castlekevin, near Glendalough.4

  O’Clery referred to the poems as salach, dirty. ‘The poems are dirty, though I’m ashamed to admit it for my own part.’ Fr Brendan Jennings translates salach as ‘disgusting’, raising the odds a lot higher. In fact, when the effort is made to dig out the offending lines about St Kevin, nothing offensive can be found in them, apart from a sentimental banality that sits comfortably in the context of popular verse. Maybe O’Clery was deploring the text as corrupt, in the sense of diluted or spoiled. On the other hand, considering the enduring tradition of St Kevin as a misogynist besieged by women, perhaps O’Clery came across something extra that he did not share.

  SAINT-COLLECTORS

  In Cashel, late that autumn, copiously copying, O’Clery was among friends or at least fellow spirits. The guardian of the Franciscan house there was also a saint-collector, while a third researcher, an undercover priest, remarked in a letter to Louvain that he had met Brother Michael in Cashel where he had made ‘a collection of more than three or four hundred Lives ….’ Difficult times, of course, encouraged anonymity, and the priest did not make a verbal sketch of O’Clery, who remains as faceless as the saints whose lives he was recording. Most of these were no more than names and dates, like a collection of moths that has withered to dust, leaving pages of scribbles and rusty pins. These saints continued to haunt the spiritual skies until the 1960s when the Vatican shot them down in droves.

  SCHOLARS

  While in Tipperary, O’Clery visited Flann MacEgan, a leading member of the MacAodhagáin family of historians, lawyers and bards who kept specialised schools in various parts of the country. O’Clery and his cousin Lughaidh were trained by Baothgalach MacAodhagáin near Loughrea in Co. Galway. Flann, the senior historian of this learned family, lived in north Tipperary, and O’Clery was to visit him several times throughout the ensuing decade, bringing completed works for approval. The perilous prospects for Gaelic culture must have been a constant theme in MacEgan’s house. It seems likely that the ever-ascending spiral of projects that O’Clery undertook in rapid succession was in some sense prompted by this centre of learning. O’Clery’s work was to open out far beyond the narrow spiritual focus set by the authorities at Louvain, to encompass the full potential of the traditional disciplines in which he had been trained, including history, genealogy and bardic learning.

  DONEGAL

  Back in Bundrowes for the winter, he tackled the haul of saints, sorting them into a catalogue of native specimens. No foreigners were allowed, which might have posed a problem with St Patrick, but did not. The collection was kno
wn as Félire na Naomh nErennach (Calendar of the Irish Saints), now known as the Martyrology of Donegal. The compilation required a great deal of work throughout the winter months, when conditions were cold by day and smoky by night. Rumours that he had the assistance of the other three masters at this early stage are fanciful. There is a desire among admirers to have them permanently in harness, toiling away by candlelight for the sake of Ireland and the greater glory of God, as if such an image would show the purity of our cause and prove our superiority as a race.

  Martyrs

  A detailed list of Irish martyrs, mostly priests and brothers, killed in Ireland 1565–1655, circulates today on the Internet. It includes hanging, disembowelment, and crushing of the skull, and there is even a priest sold into slavery in 1653. Evidence is lacking, and in some ways these reports are recurring versions of the Martyrologies of the early Christian Church. There are people who believe all of it and people who believe none. The claims are often dismissed as propagandist fabrications. But one has only to look at unstable regimes today to know that state brutality regularly occurs. It is never officially recorded and is always denied. There are Franciscans all over the world today whose lives are under constant threat from military gangs because they are pursuing social justice on behalf of indigenous people. Only the vigilance of the outside world protects them.

  Within two years of the completion of O’Clery’s book of saints, his superior in Louvain, Fr Fleming, was killed near Prague, where the Franciscans had opened a new college. He was reported to have been hacked to death, at the age of thirty-two, by heretical peasants with axes, while his companion, Father Hore, was nailed to a tree, shot in the breast and had his side pierced by a sword. The account comes from a report in Ó Bruaideadha’s Propugnaculum Catholicae Veritatis, published in Prague, 1669. (Again, the question of distortion for propaganda purposes arises.) The blissful response of Fr Brendan Jennings OFM, writing in the 1930s, reveals the attitude to such horrors that still existed in a relatively modern Ireland, saturated in the cult of martyrdom. ‘Father Fleming,’ according to Jennings, ‘would scarcely have asked of his beloved Irish saints a more glorious end to the life he had dedicated to their service.’

  It is difficult to believe that, as a scholar, O’Clery trusted the kind of information he was recording, however strong his faith. The lives of saints are full of transparent contradictions and of oddities passed off as miracles. No wonder he left notes such as, atu tuirseach gion gub iongnadh (I’m weary and no wonder). One suspects that the medium itself – the manuscripts, the vellum, the genealogies – was history to its keepers, just as the Bible actually is religion to some believers. The book, or the bardic poem, was in a sense the real thing, rather than the shadowy people or events that lay behind it.

  Michael O’Clery must have been conscious of the danger of his work and his travels in troubled times, although extraordinary reports of freedom in the 1620s abound. One account from Derry asserts that the sheriff heard cases brought by priests against members of their flocks for non-payment of dues, and found in favour of the priests. However, not much more than a generation earlier, the superior of the Franciscans in Donegal, Thaddeus Boyle, had been butchered in the porch of his Abbey, which was eventually destroyed. In 1612, an eighty-year-old Franciscan bishop, Conor O Devaney, was hanged in Dublin, after a jury with only one Irish member found him guilty of treason.

  Despite the completion of the Martyrology, O’Clery was on the road again the following summer, zigzagging throughout the south on a mopping-up operation towards a second version of the work. He swept from Cork to Limerick, to Killaloe in Co. Clare, and north to Galway, then back southeast to scoop up crumbs in Clonmel and Wexford. He was driven perhaps to greater urgency by the stabs of futility he experienced. One work he copied in passing was corrupt and uneven, and a great deal of it was utter nonsense, he complained.

  It would be wrong to assume that he was concentrating only on saints. Skidding at speed from source to source, he was becoming aware of the range of material available for more pressing work. His reception throughout the country, however muted, was in the tradition of the aes dána – the professional intellectuals and craftsmen who had always travelled freely and were welcomed in each others’ houses. He had impeccable credentials as a member of the Ó Cléirigh family of historians; as a Franciscan, he encountered a further network of hospitality, tenuous though it must have been.

  Back in Bundrowes for another winter, O’Clery further refined the Martyrology, producing a copy for Louvain which was rapturously received by his superiors as the last word in the hagiographical war. They did not see the fretful note jotted down elsewhere: ‘And without doubt I recognise that I am writing a great deal slowly, tediously, badly ….’ It went on: ‘however let the blame be on those people who instructed me to follow the trail of the old books until the time of their revision.’ Unfortunately Brother Michael never saw the fruit of his tedious labour published. The Martyrology lay in dusty oblivion for two hundred years and more before it finally reached the public.

  O’Clery embarked at once on a more ambitious project; he had not yet shaken off those saints. The Succession of the Kings of Ireland, Réim Rioghraidhe na hÉireann and the Genealogies of the Irish Saints, Seanchas na Naomh were still related to the original task imposed by Louvain. As Brendan Jennings OFM remarks, a great many holy men were of aristocratic stock and so ‘it was important to the Irish to trace their lineage, since the Irish always held pedigree in high regard.’ In fact, to be brutally honest, the Irish held very little in higher regard than pedigree, and speaking of the Gaelic nobles, it could easily appear that they held nothing in high regard except pedigree.

  The Competition

  Seathrún Céitinn (Fr Geoffrey Keating), who was collecting material for a history at the same time, was not made as welcome as O’Clery. His ancestors had come to Ireland in the wake of the Anglo-Normans four centuries earlier and, as far as certain learned families in the west were concerned, Keating was not yet out of quarantine. Their suspicions were based on conservatism, but also on the amount of abuse that had been slung at the native Irish by propagandists such as Camden, Campion, Davies, Moryson, Spenser and Stanyhurst. Ironically, one of the main purposes of Keating’s work (Foras Feasa ar Éirinn) was to refute those distortions, and his work was to be popular for centuries. It was written in a clear, lucid style that anticipated the Irish written today, while O’Clery clung to the archaic language of the bardic classes. It is tempting to imagine O’Clery and Keating tussling over a manuscript in some damp stone house in the early seventeenth century, or removing key material to foil each other, as students did in the UCD library in the 1960s before exams, when crucial texts were rare. But there is no record that O’Clery and Keating ever met, and folklore has not risen to the challenge. O’Clery was to issue a warning later against those with lower standards working in his field, but there was no reason for Keating’s ear to itch.

  Below the ranks of nobles, senior churchmen and bards, the common people did not officially exist. Pedigree was everything, and genealogy was its science. In the broader sense, genealogy confirmed a solid origin-myth, plugging the race securely back into the generator of the Bible, so that a king or a saint might have his power traced all the way back to Noah.

  THE FOUR MASTERS

  For this major undertaking (the genealogies of kings and saints), the collaboration of independent historians was required, to ensure balance. But history was a tight little world, and the available experts were closely related. Brother Michael brought together Cúchoigcríche Ó Cléirigh (his own cousin), Fearfeasa Ó Maolchonaire and Cúchoigcríche Ó Duibhgheanáinn – and the Four Masters were formed. As with many a group, the name came later. O’Clery’s three collaborators were lay professionals, requiring payment for their work. Fearfeasa belonged to a learned Roscommon family, and was closely related to the Franciscan (Florence Conry) who founded St Antony’s College at Louvain. The Ó Duibh-gheannáin were tradi
tional historians from Leitrim serving the Ó Fearghail family of Co. Longford.

  The four experts came together in late autumn 1630, in a Franciscan convent on the shores of Lough Ree, near Athlone. With a strong sense of destiny, they began work on the Feast of St Francis, 4 October. Their patron lived nearby. If he forgot his obligations, he could be reminded. There must have been an urgent deadline, because they toiled day and night for an intense month, paring the material O’Clery had gathered down to its genealogical skeleton. The urgency may have owed more to the political situation than to the limits of the patron’s purse, since most of the Franciscan houses in Ireland closed that year with several hundred monks going into exile.

  The work itself is breathtaking in its detail, and accurate within the historical period when checked against other sources. It sweeps way back behind history, of course, and all the kings of Ireland are traced systematically to their mythic origins, with dates and durations of reign quoted. Because the saints are all descended from kings, they follow in groups of geographical origin, commencing with Adamnan and the saints of Donegal.5

  With great difficulty, Brother Michael had found a patron. Toirrdhealbhach Mac Cochlain was certainly not a master of Irish himself and had been the first to have an ancient text translated into English for his own use. Even the translator took a swipe at him for that, sneering at those Irish ‘who choose rather to put their children to learn English than their own native language.’