Fear, Fire and Reform
The surviving annals do not provide a complete national record, and their dates do not always agree. Entries were copied, combined and sometimes shifted by later scribes. Events reported independently by several chronicles can usually be treated with confidence; details appearing only in the much later Annals of the Four Masters require greater caution. The evidence is also socially uneven. Kings, bishops, abbots, battles, fires and extraordinary signs were considered worth recording, whereas the work of farmers, craftworkers and sailors usually entered the written record only indirectly.