1920 71 Notes and Documents The Sources of Conchubranus' Life of St. Monenna The Vita Sanctae Monennae, compiled by a writer named Conchubranus, is extant in a single manuscript, Cotton, Cleopatra A. ii. ff. 36-566, beautifully written by an English scribe, cleariy not by the author himself, in the first half of the twelfth century .1 When I printed it in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy for 1910,^ I remarked ^ that it presented an extraordinary and apparently insoluble confusion of names, dates, and places.* I shall now attempt to clear up this chaos by a study of the sources of the Vita. The author, Conchubranus, reveals his name, which is probably merely a Latinization of Conchobhar, a common Irish name, in the closing paragraph (iii. 14, p. 238), but no other known docu- ment mentions him, and we can only conjecture his date from internal evidence. The Vita was largely drawn upon by Geoffrey, abbot of Burton-on-Trent from 1114 to 1151,^ the compiler of a Vita S. Modwennae. Conchubran's Vita cannot therefore have been written later than about 1120. The earlier limit can be arrived at thus : As will presently appear, Conchubran copied almost verbatim from several sources. In one of these we find the terms Scottia, Scottici, Scottigene, applying always to the modern Scotland. Now it has been abundantly proved that it was not till the middle of the tenth century that we find any part of North Britain designated as Scottia.^ A century later the ' There are many errors in the text. The provenance of the manuscript is unknown. Probably it came from Burton-on-Trent (cf. the distichs on f. 60 a, and the note on the recto of the second leaf of a later manuscript bound in at the beginning of the volume). 2 Vol. xxviii, section C, pp. 207-38. » Ihid. p. 204.
- Unsuccessful attempts to solve the problem had been made by Pinius {Acta
Sanctorum, lulii t. ii, 1721, pp. 241-6), who says of Conchubran's Vita {ibid. p. 290), ' deteximus in hac vita errores chronologicos, tricas, narrationes rerum incredibilium, confusiones, et cetera id genus, quae vix legas sine nausea ' ; Forbes {Kalendars of Scottish Saints, 1872, pp. 404-7) ; Skene {Celtic Scotland, ii, 1877, pp. 37-8) ; O'Hanlon {Lives of the Irish Saints, vii [1892], pp. 55-63, 79-93). ' Cf. Annales de Burton, ad ann. 1114 et 1151 (ed. Luard, Annates Monastici, i, 1864, p. 186). « Skene {loc. cit. i, 1876, pp. 1-7).
