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Michael O'Clery

c. 1590–1643

 

If there is one work in Gaelic which has proved to be more influential than any other, there would be general agreement that it must be The Annals of the Four Masters, which the lay Franciscan brother Michael O'Clery and his three colleagues were responsible for.  It is the essential work of reference to which everyone interested in the history of Ireland has to have recourse.

      Michael O'Clery (in Gaelic Micheál ó Clérigh) was born in Donegal in Ulster about 1590, though the earlier date of 1575 has also been suggested.  He was born the son of a local Gaelic chief at Kilbarron Castle, near Ballyshannon, and was baptized Tadhg, or Timothy.  The O'Clerys had inherited the office of historian of Tir Chonaill, and Michael O'Clery was imbued with the love of history and poetry from an early age.

      He was educated at various schools in Ireland before he went abroad to study in Europe, going into the Spanish Netherlands before 1621.  He became a Franciscan brother, taking the name in religion of Michael in or about 1622 at Louvain, where Franciscans from Ireland had established a college in 1607.

      Many writers and scholars of importance had been attached to this college, and it was a recognized centre of learning in things Irish.  It was intended to create religious literature in Gaelic that would be sent among the Irish in Ireland.  A printing press, set up in 1611, produced many books over the next sixty years.

      When O'Clery arrived, there was already in hand a plan by Fr Hugh Ward, Fr Patrick Fleming and others to collect and publish the lives of the Irish saints.  O'Clery already had a reputation as a historian, and in 1626 he was sent back to Ireland by the head of the college to collect materials for this work.  He was to stay in Ireland for the next eleven years.

      While he was collecting and copying manuscript materials, such as the Book of Lismore, which he studied in 1629, O'Clery also assembled works of his own calendars of saints' feasts, and genealogies of the families of kings and saints, which he finished at Athlone in November 1630.  He completed his copy of the Books of Invasions at Lisgoole, Fermanagh, in December 1631.  He also edited earlier works.

      It was in collaboration with three other scholars that he completed his greatest work, The Annals of the Four Masters (in Gaelic, Annála Rioghacta Eireann, 'Annals of the Kings of Ireland'), between 1632 and 1636.  His helpers were Farfasa O'Mulcrony, Peregrine O'Clery, and Peregrine O'Duignan.

      These annals had been collected from various earlier ones and edited into coherence.  They cover the history of Ireland from the remotest days of its legendary past reckoned from the day of creation up to 1616 A.D.  Though the early entries are sparse bare notes of lootings, burnings, murders, battles, and the deaths and reigns of kings, as time advances towards the compilers' own day the entries fill out to provide an almost continuous narrative.

      The book was compiled in a little house on the banks of the River Dowse where it flowed from Lough Melvin into Donegal Bay.  It was begun by the four of them on 22nd January 1632, and finished on 10th August 1636.  The work was given its more familiar name, The Annals of the Four Masters, by Fr John Colgan as a tribute to the compiler and his friends.  It was dedicated to their patron, Fergal O'Gara, lord of Moy Gara, the prince of Coolavin.  In his preface addressed to Fergal, O'Clery explains his purpose: 'I thought that I could get the assistance of the chroniclers for whom I had most esteem, in writing a book of annals in which these matters might be put on record, for that should the writing of them be neglected at present, they would not again be found to be put on record even to the end of the world.  All the best and most copious books of annals that I could find throughout all Ireland were collected by me - though it was difficult for me to collect them - into one place to write this book.'

      O'Clery was right about the dangers.  Hardly any of the original materials he saw have survived to this day, many perishing in the turmoil of the Cromwellian and Williamite wars.

      The great Dr Douglas Hyde, later the first president of Ireland, observed of the annals: 'It is not too much to say that there is not an event in the whole of Irish history from the birth of Christ down to the beginning of the seventeenth century that the first enquiry of the student about it must not be: "What do the Four Masters say about this?"'

      In 1637 O'Clery returned to Louvain, where he set about compiling a glossary of obscure words, a work which was printed in 1644, the year after his death.  His collections were later used by Fr John Colgan in his Acts of the Irish Saints, his triple work on the three patrons of Ireland - Patrick, Bridget, and Columba.  The original plan to publish the lives of the Irish saints as a whole came to nothing with the death of Colgan's successor.  In due course most of the material made its way into print during the nineteenth century, with the revival of interest in the Irish past.  The annals themselves were translated and annotated by John O'Donovan, and it is his much praised edition which is usually read today.

      O'Clery's own manuscripts are preserved in the Burgundian Library in Brussels.  His died as he had lived, a poor scholar in the service of his country's past.