of first rate importance for the historian of the Celtic church.
Underneath the later concoction of fable is a solid substratum of fact
which no serious student can ignore. Even where the narrative is
otherwise plainly myth or fiction it sheds many a useful sidelight on
ancient manners, customs and laws as well as on the curious and often
intricate operations of the Celtic mind.

By "Lives" are here meant the old MS. biographies which have come down
to us from ages before the invention of printing. Sometimes these
"Lives" are styled "Acts." Generally we have only one standard "Life"
of a saint and of this there are usually several copies, scattered in
various libraries and collections. Occasionally a second Life is found
differing essentially from the first, but, as a rule, the different
copies are only recensions of a single original. Some of the MSS. are
parchment but the majority are in paper; some Lives again are merely
fragments and no doubt scores if not hundreds of others have been
entirely lost. Of many hundreds of our Irish saints we have only the
meagre details supplied by the martyrologies, with perhaps occasional
reference to them in the Lives of other saints. Again, finally, the
memory of hundreds and hundreds of saints additional survives only in
place names or is entirely lost.

There still survive probably over a hundred "Lives"--possibly one
hundred and fifty; this, however, does not imply that therefore we have
Lives of one hundred or one hundred and fifty saints, for many of the
saints whose Acts survive have really two sets of the latter--one in
Latin and the other in Irish; moreover, of a few of the Latin Lives and
of a larger number of the Irish Lives we have two or more recensions.
There are, for instance, three independent Lives of St. Mochuda and one
of these is in two recensions.