Osséne of Clonmacnoise
The evidence for Ireland in 706 CE is unusually compact. No surviving Irish source describes a great battle, a royal assembly, a harvest, or a new law for this calendar year. Instead, the annals preserve a sequence of deaths: men connected with a major monastery, a leading church at Armagh, a regional kingship, learning, and—more uncertainly—the political world across the North Channel. The apparent thinness of the record is itself revealing. Early Irish annalists did not attempt a full chronicle of ordinary life. They selected deaths, killings, successions, ecclesiastical notices and exceptional events which mattered to their religious and political communities.