Conflicting Annals
Archived: 3 November 2026
Abstract
In 648 CE, Ireland was governed through many competing kingships, churches and kin-groups rather than by a single state, and the surviving evidence must be handled with unusual care. A famous cluster of notices is assigned to this year by the seventeenth-century Annals of the Four Masters: the ninth year of Conall and Cellach, the death of Maincheni, abbot of Meanadrochit, the conflict of Cúil Corra in which Cillíne son of Forannán of Uí Failge was killed, and the death of Cugamhna son of Suibne. Yet the older annalistic traditions place the same cluster several years later, under their annal