Whitley Stokes • 1905
This Irish metrical martyrology is dated by the editor to c. 800 A.D., which makes it the earliest of extant Irish martyrologies.
The manuscripts are Brussels, Royal Library, MS 5100-5104; Dublin, Trinity College, MS 1337 (formerly H.3.18); Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, MS 23.P.6 (the Leabhar Breac, 'Speckled Book', or Great Book of Dun Doighre); Royal Irish Academy MS 23.P.3; London, British Library, Egerton MS 88; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 610 (SC 1132); Rawlinson B.505 (SC 11852); Rawlinson B.512 (SC 11859); and two MSS in private hands: the 'Cheltenham' MS, described as being at Thirlstaine House, Cheltenham,1 and a MS from the Dublin, Franciscan Friary, Merchants Quay. This latter (Dillon A7) is now in the Franciscan Library, Killiney, County Dublin, whither it was transferred in 1946. Unfortunately the volume includes a mass of corrigenda and addenda. See CLLA 1080, Kenney, n. 272.
NOTE
1 This was in fact the famous collection left to his daughter by Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872). Stokes had clearly been allowed to examine the MS, then in the custody of the Rev. John E. A. Fenwick, though was unsure of its subsequent fate. It appears to be identifiable with MS G.10 of the National Library of Ireland, purchased from the Phillipps heirs in 1931 by Richard Irvine Best for the Library's Trustees. See Alan Noel Latimer Munby, The Dispersal of the Phillipps Library, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1960, pp. 81-86; NLI, fasc. I, pp. 60-65.