The runaway British slave who called himself Patricius tells us in this Confession that on making land after his escape from Ireland the and the ship’s crew had to journey for twenty-eight days before coming across any other human beings. Bury (Life of St Patrick, London, 1905) offered the explanation that they must have found themselves in a part of Gaul which had just been devastated by the Vandals, who burst into the west in the first days of 407. The idea was tempting. The date 407, combined with 431 (the year which is known from Prosper’s contemporary chronicle to have been that in which Pope Celestine sent Palladius as ‘first bishop’ to the Irish Christians), not only gave a fairly firm chronological anchorage to Patrick’s career, but also forged for him an early link with the continent, whence, according to his seventh-century Irish biographers, Muirchú and Tírechán, he ultimately returned to Ireland as successor to Palladius.

By all accounts Michael O’Brien, that fine scholar and most generous and unassuming of men, was not happy about his Corpus genealogiarum Hiberniae, vol. i. He had it in hand for years and spent an incalculable mount of meticulous labour on it, but only near the end of his life, with great reluctance, did he consent to its publication. The proofs lacked what he considered final correction, and he feared leaving a legacy of avoidable error. Of course what he did leave was an instrument of scholarship, the value and uses of which other men will be decades in proving out. To our gratitude for his learning and labours we should therefore add an almost equal gratitude to those friends who insisted that he publish despite the probability that residual error might still amount to a fraction of one per cent. Our thanks may indeed be the greater since we learn from the introduction that this volume was intended as the first ‘of a series to contain all important Irish pedigrees and genealogical material from the earliest literary period down to c. 1500 A.D.’. If it seems unlikely now that we shall see vol. ii or any of the others, we might so easily not have had even vol. i.