geography is detailed and correct; its references to contemporaries of
Mochuda are accurate on the whole and there are few inconsistencies or
none. Moreover it sheds some new light on that chronic puzzle--
organisation of the Celtic Church of Ireland. Mochuda, head of a great
monastery at Rahen, is likewise a kind of pluralist Parish Priest with a
parish in Kerry, administered in his name by deputed ecclesiastics, and
other parishes similarly administered in Kerrycurrihy, Rostellan, West
Muskerry, and Spike Island, Co. Cork. When a chief parishioner lies
seriously ill in distant Corca Duibhne, Mochuda himself comes all the
way from the centre of Ireland to administer the last rites to the dying
man, and so on.

The relations of the people to the Church and its ministers are in many
respects not at all easy to understand. Oblations, for instance, of
themselves and their territory, &c., by chieftains are frequent.
Oblations of monasteries are made in a similar way. Probably this
signifies no more than that the chief region or monastery put itself
under the saint's jurisdiction or rule or both. That there were other
churches too than the purely monastic appears from offerings to Mochuda
of already existing churches, v.g. from the Clanna Ruadhan in Decies,
&c.

Lismore, the most famous of Mochuda's foundations, became within a
century of the saint's death, one of the great monastic schools of Erin,
attracting to his halls, or rather to its boothies, students from all
Ireland and even--so it is claimed--from lands beyond the seas. King
Alfrid [Aldfrith] of Northumbria, for instance, is said to have partaken
of Lismore's hospitality, and certainly Cormac of Cashel, Malachy and
Celsus of Armagh and many others of the most distinguished of the Scots
partook thereof. The roll of Lismore's calendared saints would require,