Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/218

202 Lugaid Meann, who had already swept into Clare, fighting seven battles and reducing under his sway all the central plain up to Luchaid ford, still the county boundary on the side of Galway. A foster son stood almost in closer relation to his foster father than the latter's actual children, and Conall demanded an eric or atonement for his foster-father's death. For this he claimed the district which, despite the hostility of the Connacht tribes and the wars of their able king Fiachra, was held by the strong hand by Conall and his descendants down to Dioma, whose decisive victory in the seventh century at Knocklong wiped out all future claims of Connacht on the territory. After the Norse wars the later princes claimed lineal descent from Conall, and thus southern Connacht is said to have become "North Munster," Tuadh Mumhan, or Thomond, in the stead of the older district of that name south of the Shannon.

5. Early Christian Period.

Here we ought to be on safer ground, but at their best the records are so very imperfect down to the ninth century that we have to depend largely upon late documents, which are rather sermons than histories, though doubtless recording some facts. Older writers argue from the use of the present tense and from such statements as that the saint "is at" a place that the Lives are contemporary. But we, recognizing the vivid faith that a Saint was alive for evermore, or that his relics were at the place, must look for other proof. Wherever, as in the cases of St. Patrick and St. Columba, we can test the eleventh and twelfth century legends by earlier information, the result prescribes great caution in dealing with any late Life without surviving predecessors. The "field legends" were probably kept in shape by the lections of the clerics until, at any rate, the overturn of the old regime late in the reign of Elizabeth. The Reformation, accepted from the English