A Gaelic Family

A GAELIC FAMILY in FACT, FABLE AND FUN Questions to Answer Edward MacLysaght's 'More Irish Families' came as something of a shock to me as someone of Kneafsey surname with roots in the Knock and Achadh Mór area. Expecting to find an Irish spelling and perhaps a meaning, I was not surprised to find Ó Cnáimhsighe, but I was surprised that Kneafsey is just one of three derivatives, the others being Bonner and Crampsie. From the figures provided, these others seem to be more numerous. It was surprising to see no mention by MacLysaght of Mayo, and to read that historically the name has been found 'almost exclusively' in northern Co. Donegal. Further, Scannlán, the first person recorded with the surname Ó Cnáimhsighe, was in far away Lismore. We know that Irish names were discouraged under English rule and alternatives were sometimes found. Translation was an option, and what MacLysaght calls 'pseudo-translation'. In the example of our name, the Irish 'cnámh' means bone, so an Anglicisation to the established surname Bonner seems plausible enough. However, MacLysaght goes on to tell us that the genealogist Professor Woulfe considered Cnáimhsighe to be one of Ireland's few matronymic names, being derived from the woman's name Cnáimhseach. The relationship of these names was evidently widely known. MacLysaght tells us that the list of synonyms of emigrants compiled by the Cunard Steamship Company equated Bonner with Crampsie, but that no mention was

made of Kneafsey. Yet we know there are Kneafseys in America. So MacLysaght leaves unanswered the question of whether the name has a meaning, and many other questions arise from the information he provides. Why was Scannlán in what is now Co. Waterford, at the opposite end of the country from Donegal? How did Mayo get into the picture? If there was a movement to Mayo, what proportion of the clan went? Did the Ó Cnáimhsighes both change their name to Bonner and move to Mayo, or was the name-change an alternative to moving? What proportion changed the name? Why did those who did not change to Bonner become Kneafsey and Crampsie? What was responsible for all this change? Why no record by Cunard? I have to say I have been aware for over 20 years of the questions posed for my surname by MacLysaght. With interest rekindled during my visit to Ireland for my uncle's, Tom Kneafcy-Swift's, concert in Ballyhaunis in 1992, organised by Mór Ealíon-Achadh Mór, I thought plotting the distribution might shed a bit of light on the subject. Many of the jobs I work on for a living call for mapping of customer origins around shopping centres, so I know that mapping a population can tell a lot about it. But coming back after all this time I found the field was no longer in darkness. The Royal Irish Academy's 'Dictionary of the Irish Language', published in 1976, provided a meaning for Cnáimhseach and a context in both fact and fable. Once I realised there was a trail, all I had to do was to follow it

and try and make sense of the sights I passed along the way, which the maps helped to do. The 'fun' element of the title comes from a new view of a piece of Irish history seen from this trail. It may be controversial, but from where the trail left me standing, there is no other way to see it.

the present Queen's children have been given their mother's surname rather than their father's. We are all related. The 5000 year story of Céide Fields can be used to provide a perspective of the extent of relationship. We are told that 5000 years means 200 generations. A hundred years therefore means four generations. The surname that I have entered recorded history in the eleventh century, along with many other Irish surnames. A century ago four generations ago - there were eight people who came together to become my great-grandparents. A century before them there were 64 who were their great-grandparents. Continue back the nine steps to the eleventh century and I have 134 million ancestors! So has everybody else. Yet in the eleventh century Ireland had only 400,000 people, and the British Isles as a whole had only 2.5 million. So, within a small number of generations, everybody will find the same ancestors on both sides of the family tree. Whether we have the same surname or not, ancestry is shared, and history is shared. The conditions encountered by someone of a particular surname at a particular period of history will have been common to most people at that period.

Conversations in the Knock area indicate a local understanding that Kneafsey means the same as 'bone' and that as there are families called Bones in East Mayo, people think that there is a connection. This does not accord with the pseudo-translation explanation, and, as MacLysaght has MacCnámhaigh as the Irish for Bones, the received etymology of Bones is therefore not associated with Cnáimhsighe. Nevertheless, I thought I might look at the distribution of people with the Bones surname as well. There is also a surname 'Bone', but as MacLysaght has this as a derivative of de Bohun, it is obviously in a different category. In writing this, I am not saying that there is anything special about a male line of descent or a particular surname. Many families in the Knock and Achadh Mór areas are much closer in relationship to me than anybody called Bonner or Crampsie, so I hope this story will be of interest to local people generally. Written records let us trace people through a male line more easily than a female, but oral commentary in a family is just as clear on female descent. The British Royal Family shows that if the Christian name is well enough known, the surname can change time and again, as theirs has from when Duke William Bastard of Normandy conquered England in the eleventh century. Further,

Numbers and Distribution I have produced a Table of Dates and Events significant to the sept, and which help explain its distribution throughout the country. I have produced also a Table of Surnames setting out the distribution of Cnáimhsighe and its three derivatives, based on data from the telephone directories of 1990/91. Telephone ownership in the Republic 2

and in Northern Ireland in 1990 was 54% and 72% respectively. These proportions are more than ample to show a pattern of settlement. It may be assumed that families which do not have phones are related to other families nearby who do and that if we had the addresses of all households the distribution would be denser but the pattern would be essentially unchanged. The number of members of the sept with telephones is 446. Grossing this figure up by the ownership rates produces an approximate total of 770 families throughout Ireland. The two tables are at the end of the text.

cluster, which spreads and thins out eastwards. (the relative density in the North of Ireland is subject to slight exaggeration because of higher telephone ownership.)

* The east coastal area from Co. Dublin up to Drogheda. This is the next most prominent cluster and is common to all three names. There is no reference to this area in the sources on the Dates and Events Table. It may therefore be assumed to have been a destination for migrants from the other two clusters in relatively recent times. (The density here is Distribution of Ó Cnáimhsighe surnames: Telephone directory likewise slightly exaggerated because of higher phone

The data has been mapped as Ó Cnáimhsighe and as each of the three derivatives. Each of the three derivatives is found in a variety of spelling guises. The Table of Surnames sets out those current in the telephone directories. Historical documents contain many more spelling variants which have dropped out of use. On the maps and in this paper the majority form of each spelling is used as the citation form, unless specific reference is being made to one of the variants.

ownership.) * East Mayo and Sligo. Because of the break in the Cnáimhsighe settlement pattern at Leitrim, this is distinguishable as a separate cluster from the main body in Donegal and Ulster. It would be distinguishable even if the households did not have a different surname and on locational grounds alone would call for an enquiry into its origins.

Looking first at Ó Cnáimhsighe as a whole rather than the individual derivatives, it is apparent that there are three clusters of settlement: * Northern Co. Donegal. This is the original heartland and is the location of the most prominent 2

courteous, from the French Bonnaire. This would be true of Anglo-Normans called Bonner from England or Scotland. However, given that these people were from the Rhineland-Palatinate; that there is a Rhineland town now well known called Bonn; that there are surname entries in Rhineland telephone directories for Bonner; I see no reason not to take this to be a surname from a placename formed in the German manner. Whatever their origins, the map shows there is no cluster of Bonners in Limerick.

Having assembled and set out the data, it has to be tested to check whether it is safe enough to draw conclusions from. Kneafsey and Crampsie are derivatives from the Gaelic, whereas Bonner is not. Families called Bonner today may therefore have origins other than the pseudo-translation of Ó Cnáimhsighe. Is there a significant proportion of nonCnáimhsighe Bonners? The table of Dates and Events indicates that Bonner first made its appearance, as Boner, in 1665, in the Donegal County Money Hearth Rolls. A Bonar was recorded in Co. Tyrone in 1666 and two

With Scots and Palatines checked out, it may be assumed that of the 392 Bonners with telephones, only the odd one is not of Gaelic origin. For practical purposes, the data on the Bonner map is clean. But is it distorted? There are regional differences in telephone ownership throughout Ireland, most notably in Northern Ireland where the ownership rate exceeds even that in the Dublin area, which is the highest in the Republic. Fortunately for the purposes of these comparisons, Mayo/Sligo and Donegal are in the same band of ownership. The North and Dublin are of secondary importance in this analysis, so their higher rates of telephone ownership are something to be borne in mind rather than corrected for.

Distribution of Bonner surnames: Telephone directory entries. in Co. Antrim in 1669. Commenting on this information, Brian Bonner says that the two Bonars in Antrim were Scottish, being in parishes from which the local Irish had been cleared. He has misgivings about the one in Tyrone. Nonetheless, he considers that sufficient evidence is available to indicate that the nineteenth century records of the sept in Antrim, Derry, Down and Tyrone were migrants from Donegal or descendants of such. The densities on the map support Mr Bonner s view. The picture is one of dispersal from Donegal. There is no cluster of Bonners in the areas of Scottish settlement.

The most striking feature of the map of the Cnáimhsighe settlement is evident from the Bonner map. The Bonners and therefore the clan as a whole is concentrated in northern Co. Donegal. Uncorrected for ownership rates, the 229 entries there are about 58% of all the Bonners in Ireland. There are a further six in the telephone exchange area of Donegal itself, but apart from these the

Three thousand Palatine Protestant refugees arrived in Ireland in 1709. Many settled in Limerick. Some were called Bonner. Referring to these people, MacLysaght translates the name as 2

scatter south westwards ends abruptly. The distribution spreads out into Derry and Antrim, and more thinly into Tyrone and Down. There are no entries in Armagh, Monaghan or Cavan. Together, the rest of Ulster, including Donegal exchange area, contains 112, or 29%. The Dublin area - telephone area 01 - has the only other concentration, 8% of the Bonners. The number of Bonners in Connaught is about the same as it is in Munster, or in Leinster outside Dublin - just a few individual families. Excluding Dublin, the scatter of Bonners over the three southern provinces is thin and apparently random, and seems to be urban, thereby suggesting relatively recent settlement.

not change their name were on the remote fringes of the territory of the sept, out of the mainstream.

Brian Bonner shows from the Griffith valuation that the name change was still taking place then, in 1857, and how arbitrary it was. In Inishowen, of two brothers, one was recorded as Bonner and one as Crampsie; whilst one man with two farms was recorded as Bonner in respect of one and Crampsie for the other. He says that the Gaelic name is still used in the vernacular in Inishowen. He attributes the selection of surname as being down to the responsible official. Whatever the role of officials in making the choice between Bonner and Crampsie, they must have had territories for which they were responsible. The Distribution of Crampsie surnames: Telephone directory Crampsie distribution of today does not suggest a pattern. Perhaps use of the name has declined even further since the Griffith valuation. A late shift from Crampsie in Inishowen may account for the selection of the uniform spelling of Bonner there: of 34 telephone directory entries in Inishowen, 33 have the one spelling 'Bonner'. Elsewhere in the county, all four spellings of Bonner are found.

There are only 20 Crampsie families. Their distribution differs from that of the Bonners. Though with one exception they are all in Ulster, they are not concentrated. The four in Donegal are almost literally at the four corners of this core area. There are none in Inishowen, where a townland called Ballycramsie testifies to their former presence. Most of them seem to be coastal. Unlike the Kneafseys of the West, Crampsie settlement is distinguishable by name only, and not by location. They do not have a recognisable cluster and but for the name would be lost amongst the Bonners.

I essentially want to know what proportion of the sept left Donegal for Mayo, when and why.

The ratio of Crampsies to Bonners in Donegal provides the answer on the relationship of staying and changing name. There are 235 Bonners to 4 Crampsies. In other words, 98% of those who stayed changed their name. Their thin scatter suggests that the 2% who did

Is it safe to say that 8% left, reflecting the Kneafseys' present day 'market share' of the sept, or has there been a distortion 2

over time? The Kneafsey heartland in Connaught and the Bonner/Crampsie heartland in Ulster have been subject to different rates of depopulation since the Famine. The Kneafsey cluster in Mayo/Sligo does not have a significant intermixture of Bonners. With the first Bonner appearing in Donegal only in 1665, it is likely that the Kneafseys had left for Connaught before the trend to 'translation' began. This enables an adjustment to be made to pre-Famine market shares, and thereby to produce the percentage of the sept that came to Connaught.

declined 70% between 1841 and 1991, whereas Co. Donegal's decline was only 56%. There may have been other factors at work but an attempt to find the ratios of the names before the Famine can only make allowance for the different rates of population decline in Connaught and Donegal. A precise figure cannot be expected, but it seems reasonable to say that before the Famine, the Kneafseys of the West had at most about 6% of the members of the sept. To say 6% of a clan left Donegal for Connaught sounds a major migration, but numbers were small. An approximation may be made. In 1991, there were about 5.1 million people in the island of Ireland. Of these about 2.5% lived in Donegal. In 1600, there were about 1.25 million people in Ireland. Probably a greater proportion lived in Donegal, because the island was then much less urbanised. If we say 5% then lived in Donegal, this means 62,500, or about half the present day population. Grossing up and relating the Bonners in the table to the present day families puts the clan at 1.25% of the present day families. Assume it was the same ratio in 1600 and we would have 780 people. 6% of 780 is only about 50 people. This may have been 10 families, or there could have been more

Allowance must first be made for internal migration of all three names. As indicated above, Dublin and the adjacent east coast area may be assumed to have been a destination for recent internal migration. The east coast data should be separated so that the relationship of the Mayo/Sligo cluster with the main body may be considered. Taking out the 30 Bonners, 12 Kneafseys, and one Crampsie on the east coast means an adjustment to the percentages in the surnames table: Bonner would then have 90% of the members of the sept rather than 88%, Crampsie would move to 5% rather than 4%, and Kneafsey would have 5% rather than 8%.

Distribution of Kneafsey surnames: Telephone directory economically active men than others, as was usual with migrants. In any event, not many people were involved.

This drop in the proportion of Kneafseys is unsurprising, because of the heavier rate of depopulation in the West. The population of Cos. Mayo and Sligo

It is not of course possible to project the figures backwards to say how the 94% was split between Bonner and Crampsie. The 'market shares' of these names are 2

not explained by differences in the rate of depopulation - they are located in the same area - but depend upon which name was chosen by individual families. Useful in other respects, the numbers in the seventeenth century records are too few to be treated as samples, so they have nothing reliable to tell us about ratios of Bonner to Crampsie in the whole population. A shift in ratios since the Griffith valuation could be obtainable by comparing the ratios in the valuation with the 98:2 ratio of the 1990/91 telephone directories.

than the 6% of the Cnáimhsighes. As the Cnáimhsighes were from the western end of Ulster at a 6% shift, and the Bones were from the eastern end, it is tempting to put a percentage to the Bones migration, if there was one. Is it possible to hazard a guess as to what proportion of the Bones sept might have been affected? With such small numbers, hazard would be the right word. Though the 23 Bones families with phones are likely to be a large proportion of all Bones families, the extent of sampling error arises not from the relationship of the sample to the total population, but from the size of the sample itself. A sample size of 23 would be subject to a high degree of error. If the sample were to be treated in the same way as I treated the Cnáimhsighe data, correcting for appropriate rate of phone ownership, and then depopulation since the Famine, then 50% of the Bones families moved. But as we are talking about a very small number of families indeed, this could be a long way out, either way.

The distribution of the surname 'Bones' provides an interesting contrast with Cnáimhsighe. There is a similarity in that both names have a cluster in Mayo and a cluster in Ulster. There is a difference in that Bones occurs now only in anglicised form: there are no MacCnámhaigh entries anywhere. There is a further contrast in that the two Bones clusters are closer in size: six in Mayo and 16 in Ulster. The only other entry is one on the south coast. With the exception of one in Craigavon, a new town, the entries in Ulster are east of a line from Coleraine to Lisburn. It would seem safe to say that this is a Co. Antrim name. The surname 'Bone' is found exclusively in the Dublin area where there are eleven entries.

Though Bones is derived from 'cnámh', MacLysaght makes no connection of Bones and Kneafsey. As the etymology is distinct and the origin is distinct, I also would say there is no connection. Dates and Personalities

It is possible that Bones may have evolved separately in Antrim and Mayo. It is also possible that there was a movement to Mayo from Antrim. Whereas Donegal was at the margin of the plantation of Ulster, Antrim was intensively settled by lowland Scots. If there was a movement out of members of a native sept, we would expect a greater proportion to have been affected

The first person recorded with the name Cnáimhsighe was Scannlán, in 1095. He was in Lismore, about as far away from what would then have been a tighter cluster of the clan in Donegal as it was possible to get. The reason for this remarkable fact can be only be a subject for speculation. Donegal was an important Culdee centre, and Lismore an eminent monastic centre. A tradition of 2

the Culdees was to distance themselves as far as possible from kinship support to make their spiritual life that much more daunting. If this outlook still prevailed in the eleventh century, it would indicate that there was kinship support in Donegal of which Scannlán could deprive himself. It would mean that he belonged to an established family in Donegal which he had left some time earlier than 1095.

England and Wales today - then it is small wonder that he used his full handle. Warfare had broken out in 1583, and Munster was opened up for plantation in 1585. Almost 1,000 square miles, about 11% of the province, was made available for new owners, in lots of 6 - 19 square miles. If in the late sixteenth century, men from the west of Ulster were operating in the far south west of Ireland, it is likely they would have passed through east Mayo. Some may have settled there. This would mean a movement out of Donegal 80 years before Bonner made its first appearance.

Roger Ó Cnáimhsí was a vicar in Greallach, Inishowen, in 1424. This Donegal location is where we would expect to find historical evidence of the name, given the distribution illustrated on the maps. Brian Bonner says that Ó Cnáimhsí is the modern standard form of the name. There is an entry in the Dublin area for a MacCnáimhsí. He may belong to any of the three derivatives is therefore not included in any of the tables.

In 1603, after nine years of war, the independence and isolation of Ulster was brought to an end. Almost 800 square miles, just under 10% of the province, was made available for plantation. This was to be much more intensive than that in Munster. Maximum lot size was three square miles and the new owners had to bring in tenants from Britain. New roads, bridges and village layouts were provided. Five Cnáimhsighes in Inishowen were pardoned in 1609 after a rebellion the previous year.

Philip MacShane y Neasy was recorded in 1584 as one of Lord Viscount Roche's men. Lord Roche had a castle about 20 miles from Cork. He will always be remembered because Walter Raleigh brought him into Cork to face questioning about assisting rebels in 1581. Philip was almost certainly an Ulsterman. Up to this time, Ulster had been least affected by settlement from Britain. There is only one MacShane in the directory for Cork, and only one other in the southwest, in Killarney. There are 20 MacShanes in the telephone directory in Co. Donegal. Philip was proclaiming an Ulster origin on both sides of his family. If we may take it that the clan then accounted for 1.25% of households in Co. Donegal about the same strength that Smith has in

The new settlers in Ulster from Scotland and England were at first thinly spread, and an uprising against them began in 1640. In 1641 the English Civil War began and war in Ireland became countrywide. Cromwell's forces were victorious and in 1653 a further 4,000 sq miles, 12% of the country, changed hands, with consequential population shifts. Cromwell said that "the Irish can go to Hell or Connaught". 2

The Kneafseys are in or from Connaught. Had they come as refugees from Donegal after the events of 1653, or 1603, or were there other reasons?

the Kneafseys of the West missed the name change altogether.

It is accepted locally that many of the families in the Knock and Achadh Mór areas were originally from the north. Comparing the index of surnames compiled by the National Library from the Griffith valuation and the Tithe Applotment Books, Brian Bonner points out that the Mayo volume contains a remarkable similarity of surnames with Donegal. He says that the Clann Dalaigh extended their dominion, with many Donegal military men, into north Connaught in the sixteenth century and earlier; and that at least one authority, Patrick Woulfe, has it that there was a planned migration from Donegal to Mayo in the early seventeenth century. Whether he had been part of a planned move or not, local sources confirm the presence in Mayo in the seventeenth century of this previously Donegal name: a priest, Father Kneafsey, was recorded as being 54 years old in 1704. He had held secret open air masses after the destruction of Achadh Mór parish church by Cromwell's forces. His place of birth in 1650 is not recorded. Ó Cnáimhsighes in Connaught could have originated from Donegal military men stationed in or passing through Mayo, from planned migration, or from displacement. The move to Connaught occurred only a matter of decades before the name Bonner appeared in Donegal. The name change over the next two centuries caught up all but a few of the 94% left behind. Being out of the area, 1

Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go?

meaning midwife. It says Cnáimhseach seems to be from cnámh with a feminine ending 'seach', but that if so, the reason is unclear.

I still do not know what Cnáimhsighe means. The only lead MacLysaght provides is the pseudo association with 'cnámh' and thence the translation to Boner/Bonner.

The Royal Irish Academy's 1976 Dictionary of the Irish Language, which is based on Old and Middle Irish, gives us, under 'cnaimsech', the meaning of 'midwife', it suggests this is perhaps from 'macCnamsige' and gives a reference to 'cland Cnáimhsighe' in Betha Colaim Chille.

Checking for cognates, or kindred words of cnámh produces the English 'gammon' from old French 'gambe', modern 'jambe', and the English 'ham'. Old alphabets did not distinguish between 'c's and 'g's. These words in the three languages derive from a common ancestral Indo-European word. In meaning, the Irish word has specialised to bone, whilst the French 'jambe'- leg or shank - means both flesh and bone, and the English words are coming to mean meat which is de-boned. In sound, they show a progression from the hard 'c' of cnámh/gambe to a soft sound in jambe, and an aspirated sound in 'ham'; the French and English words are denasalised - no 'n'; and only the Irish has mutated the pronunciation of the 'm', to 'v'. It will be a long time before I find that this variation in pronunciation has a relevance close to what I am seeking.

So of the two routes to a meaning for Cnáimhsighe, one leads to the pseudotranslation 'bone', and one leads to a loop of Cnáimhsighe - cnáimhseach Cnáimhsighe. No matter, at least we know that Cnáimhseach is not just a personal name. It has a meaning. It looks to be a starter. The cognates of cnámh immediately bring flesh to the bone, and if cnáimhseach is part of the family of words to do with life, then its use as midwife is appropriate. I have an interest in languages, dialects and placenames, so I look for cognates for 'Cnáimhseach'. Cognates are words from the same source which may or may not have evolved into different spellings and sounds as the Indo-European languages diverged. They need not be applied to exactly the same thing in two languages, but there is usually an apparent relationship. As we know from Knock, the word 'basilica now means an ecclesiastical building. Moving 'upstream', 'basil' meant king, which it still does in some Slavic languages, so basilica was a building associated with a king or with a coronation. But not only people and buildings may have royal characteristics. There is a herb called

Though Cnáimhsighe does not mean bone, maybe both it and cnámh derive from the Indo-European root 'gnr' or 'grn' which has the meaning of growing into life, maturity or fruition. Examples in English include green, grain, corn, kernel, grow, (in)crease, generate, genetics. But there needs to be something other than 'bone' to chase. I pick up the trail in 'A Dictionary of Surnames', Oxford University Press. Under Bonner, it gives Cnáimhsighe as a descendent of Cnáimhseach, a byname 1

basil. So far these changes are only semantic. The word is still obviously the same. In English there is an a plant called the 'mistletoe'. Toe is a corruption of twig, and missel is a cognate of basil. This was another 'royal' plant, certainly in pagan religion.

the Burren. On the mountains it grows in the heather zone below the summits. It is a pioneer plant, quick to colonise bare rocks, and nowadays the broken edges of new roads. The 'L' means that Linnaeus, the Swedish founder of the Linnaean classification system of botany, was the author of the name of the plant, now used internationally. He introduced the system of describing a plant by two Latin names. For this plant he chose, possibly from established classical usage 'uva ursi'. 'Uva' means 'bunch', as of grapes, and 'ursi means 'of the bear'. '(L)' in brackets means that classification was taken further. Spreng put the plant in a genus he called 'arctostaphylos', which is just the Greek for uva-ursi. The system means that a kindred plant could be called arctostaphylos something-else.

In Scottish Gaelic I find the word 'cnaimhseag'. It has the meaning 'bearberry', and 'cnaimhseagach' means abounding in bearberries. I shall compare Irish and Scottish pronunciation later. This is so much a source meaning that any other meaning must be downstream from it. I then expect to find cnáimhseach as the Irish for bearberry, but I have not been able to find an Irish word for this plant. No matter. It now becomes necessary to find out about the plant and to check whether it has properties that would give the word that describes it a downstream meaning of midwife.

Linnaeus' 'Genera Plantarum' was published in 1753, pre-dating the age of the dictionary. Johnson published two years later in 1755; Robinson published in 1826; Webster in 1832; and the Imperial Dictionary was published in 1850. In other words, the lexicographers had Linnaeus in front of them when they wrote up their works. The lexicographers of England, France, Germany and Italy have translated uva ursi into their respective languages. We therefore get bearberry, or beargrapebunch in all these languages.

The plant is an erica, or heather. It grows all around the northern landmasses of Eurasia and North America, as far south as the Mediterranean, Japan and California. It is the only member of the family less common in Atlantic Europe than Central Europe. To give it its full name, arctostaphylos uva-ursi (L) Spreng, is a small evergreen shrub with creeping branches, and white or pink flowers. The berry is red with an acid taste. It is widespread in coniferous forests and humus soils of uplands and mountainous regions of Europe, up to 2,400 metres (7,800 feet). Preferring rather dry scree slopes, it grows on the moors, rocks and banks of Scotland and in some places in northern England. It is found on the north and west fringes of Ireland from Antrim through Donegal to

Some languages have retained folknames, which help provide popular perceptions of the plant. Linnaeus' commission from the Swedish government included observing the customs and agricultural methods of the people, with an eye to profitable 2

development. The word in the Swedish dictionary is miöll. The Norwegian word is melbaer, or mjølbaer. Miöll, 'mel' and 'mjøl' mean 'flour', or 'meal' as in oatmeal. From this name, we may take it that the plant or part of it is or was ground down into a 'meal'. Perhaps miöll was one of a number of dialect options, preferred by Linnaeus because it indicated a use. There must have been options. The Old Norse word for heather was 'lyng'. 'Ling' is used from this source in parts of England for types of heather, and the Icelandic for bearberry is 'sortulyng'. In England the plant is sometimes known as Mountain Box.

flowering broom in his cap when out to hunt. The old French was 'genest' and the Latin 'genesta' or 'genista'. If we pronounce 'genista' with the hard 'g' the Latin letter would have represented, and give the 't' a soft Irish sound, we virtually have 'Cnáimhseach'. The genista is not a heather of course, but it shares the cnaimhseag's evergreen characteristic. It can also be a pioneer. The other possible cognate for Cnáimhseach/cnaimhseag is the old Latin form 'gnasci' meaning 'be born'. In derivatives from this word the 'g' has either gone soft, as in 'Genesis', or gone altogether, as in 'nativity'. (Pre)gnant is a sixteenth century learned construction. The compilers of the Irish dictionaries may have been influenced by this in their definition of Cnáimhseach.

Other Celtic words for bearberry might be useful. Though Welsh dictionaries do not have a word for bearberry, we are fortunate in Welsh in that in the thirteenth century the physicians to the native Princes of Wales recorded their remedies. The remedies were of course already old. The physicians were a community based at Myddfai and they knew the bearberry. Their records were translated from Old Welsh to Modern Welsh and English in 1860. The bearberry was known to the Myddfai by three names: ffrwyth yr arthwydden; greol y pren melyn; and gwyfon yr yspinwydd. None of these is a cognate of cnaimhseag. The fact that there are three Welsh words shows that we may expect there to be an Irish word, and probably more than one. Also, cnaimhseag may not be the only word for bearberry in Scottish Gaelic.

As we are interested in the bearberry, Scottish Gaelic has several expressions for 'bear', and two of them are cognates of the Indo-European set of urs/arth/arct which the Germanic and some Slav languages abandoned, it is thought for taboo reasons, in favour of the 'brown one'. Irish Gaelic has adopted the taboo substitute from English. Berrying plants and evergreens were very important to our ancestors, not just for food, but as symbols and remedies. We need look no further than Mayo and York for Celtic placenames to do with yew trees. Leaving aside symbolism for the moment, has the bearberry a medicinal value? Its leaves contain arbutin and methyl arbutin. These substances have a neutral effect on healthy organs, but are activated into a strong antiseptic on

Latin provides two possible cognates. The first King of England to come to Ireland, Henry II, Plantagenet got his surname from the practice of one of his Angevin forebears of wearing a sprig of 2

contact with diseased organs, particularly bladders and kidneys. Inflammation of these organs is much more frequently encountered by women than by men, and women just before and just after childbirth are particularly at risk. The leaves also contain flavonoids, which strengthen blood capillaries and prevent small cutaneous haemorrhages frequent in older people .

that of surnames derived from Cnáimhsighe. Choosing a name from the characteristics of the plant, Linnaeus opted for the bunch-berry feature for his botanic Latin, supplemented by an observation of the fauna that likes to feed on the berries. This may have been from classical sources. The Scandinavians call it miöll or melbaer because the dried leaves are milled into a meal or tissane. I suggest the Scots Gaels call it cnaimhseag because of growth: either because it grows year-round or because it is the first life on bare rocks.

There is a further property which as far as I can see confirms the connection between cnaimhseag the bearberry and cnáimhseach the midwife. The bearberry is oxytocic, which means that it has the effect of accelerating a birth. Oxytocin is produced naturally by the body, but can be synthesised. According to the British Medical Association's 'Guide to Medicines and Drugs', it is normal to use oxytocin to induce labour.

The etymology of cnáimhseach is now clear. There can be little doubt of the kinship of cnaimhseag the source of oxytocin and cnáimhseach the prescriber of oxytocin. If we fuse the two Gaelic words, we produce the idea that cnáimhseach was indeed a midwife, in the literal sense of 'withwife', but that it was not a person but a plant. Just as historians will index their books to indicate Plantagenet as a dynasty rather than a plant, so the Irish lexicographers have, from the context, entered cnáimhseach as a midwife rather than a plant.

The Guide does not of course indicate the principal source of modern day supplies of oxytocin, but as far as the bearberry is concerned, leafy branches of the plant may be collected year-round, sometimes commercially. The leaves are separated from the stems by beating and sieving. They are then broken into a tissane, which means the leaves are broken to tea-leaf size.

How did Cnáimhseach become a woman's personal name? Perhaps the midwife would wear a sprig of bearberry for luck, thus acquiring a nickname in the same way as the Angevin Counts acquired Plantagenet. Perhaps she made the herbal tea. In any event, Heather is an acceptable personal name for a woman, in any language.

So the bearberry is evergreen; it has red berries which appear in groups; it is of high altitude; it is a pioneer; it may be collected year-round, sometimes commercially. In oxytocin, it has a medical property generally prescribed to women today in and just after childbirth. It appears to be unique in having this combination of properties. Its distribution in Ireland matches well with 2

A Skeleton in the Cupboard?

work he died. And this was a great grief to Padraic, for there was not in this world his like of a smith. And there came to him an angel and bade him not be sorrowful, for it was not for him that God had willed that work should be completed, but for the son of Eternal Life, to wit, for Columcille. And many years thereafter Columcille came to that same place. And he found that work unfinished there. And he gat not in Erin a smith to finish it as he would fain have had it. And he went to the tomb wherein Connla the Craftsman was laid, and he let open the tomb. And he assembled the bones of Connla together and blessed and hallowed them. And he said, 'In the name of Jesu Christ, arise from the dead, Connla the Smith.' And at the word of Columcille straightway he rose up in the presence of all, as he might rise from sleep. And he lived twenty years after that, and he

The bearberry explains the connection between cnaimhseag the source of oxytocin, cnáimhseach the midwife and Cnáimhseach the personal name. Why then, when it came to selecting an anglicised name, did Cnáimhsighe not become Heather, or Heath, or Burberry? How did Bonner get in on the act? The choice of Bonner is important, because 90% of the clan now have that name. Bonner began to appear in writing in the seventeenth century. Surely in those days people would not have mistranslated Gaelic words? To find an explanation, we have to go back to 'cnaimsech' in the dictionary of the Royal Irish Academy. It gives a reference to a paragraph in Betha Colaim Chille, or Life of Columcille, a book compiled in 1532 by Manus O'Donnell, and edited by A O'Kelleher and G Schoepperle, 1918, Chicago: 146. On a time that Padraic was in a place called the Height in the Ciannachta of Glenngemin, he blessed a certain spot that is called Dun Cruin. And there he builded an oratory. And he caused Connla the Craftsman to make a precious casket for him, where he might hold in safeguard the gospels and many relics of the saints. And ere he had made an end of that 1

begat children. And of his seed is the clan Cnaimhsighe, be reason that he had been a long time in bones ere he was brought back to life. And Columcille gave the work that Padraic had begun to Connla the Craftsman that he might finish it for him. And it is the Shrine of Columcille today. And Columcille laid therein many relics of the saints of Erin, and it is said that he put therein the side hair of the Virgin Mary...

of the druids. Now known as the Stone of Scone, or the Stone of Destiny, it forms part of the Coronation Chair on which every English monarch has been crowned since Edward I in 1272. Edward I revived the Arthurian legend, and no doubt would have prized this stone. Arthur means 'the Bear' of course, and arthwydden is part of one of the Welsh words for bearberry. Columcille was the patron saint of the O'Donnell family of Donegal chieftains to which Manus belonged, and was of the same family. Manus' father and grandfather were known at the Scottish and English royal courts. The most exciting thinker of his youth was Erasmus, who, amongst his vast output, produced highly successful popular satires. Manus was about 19 when Erasmus brought out 'In Praise of Folly', using sarcasm against worldly church and secular leaders.

The words in Italic read: Conadh ar a slicht ataid cland cnaimhsighe trena beith fen ina cnamhaibh aimsir foda riana aithbeougad. The Connla legend prepares the ground for the pseudo translation to Boner/Bonner which appears in writing 130 years later, and most probably appeared in speech much sooner than that.

O'Donnell had commissioned scholars to collect all accounts of Columcille which were 'scattered throughout the ancient books of Erin'. Betha Colaim Chille contains a great deal of material datable to the Middle Irish period and therefore in existence before 1200. Manus wrote the final draft himself, in vernacular Irish comprehensible to ordinary people.

Columcille is well known outside Ireland as St Columba. He was born at Gartan, in Donegal in 521 AD, founded the abbey on Iona in 563, and died there in 597. In passing, Iona is another placename to do with yew trees. In preChristian times it was held sacred by the druids, and Columba established the tradition of having the kings of Scotland crowned on Iona, and on the Black Stone

In 1532, Manus was about 40 years old and was at the height of his powers. He was well known throughout Ireland, and was known abroad. His entourage could include French people. He dressed splendidly and built grandly. He wrote love poems, and epigrams poking fun at his Observant friars. Unlike writers hitherto, he was neither a cleric nor a professional scholar, but that 2

Renaissance figure, an enthusiastic layman. Dr Brendan Bradshaw discusses him in an article "Manus 'The Magnificent' : O'Donnell as Renaissance Prince." This is an image to keep in mind. Significantly for what I have to say about him, Manus was scrupulous in his observation of his marriage vows.

Medieval authors referred to readers and hearers, and so too did Manus. Solitary reading perhaps doubled as rehearsal for later public reading. The 'reader' would read aloud to an audience convened in some congenial place. The word 'lecturer' recalls this today. Irish people were part of this process. Many sons of Anglo-Norman Irish noble houses would be in Oxford and Cambridge for their education, and for other reasons Irish people would be in British and continental centres.

In 1532, Manus' leading contemporaries were King Henry VIII of England, who was then 41 years old; Queen Catharine, from whom the King had been separated for seven years, was 47; Pope Clement VII was 54; Luther was 47; Loyola was 49; Calvin was 23: King Francis I of France was 38; the Emperor Charles V was 32; Erasmus was 66 and Sir Thomas More was 54. Surviving to the then grand old age of 71, Manus would outlive all of them except Calvin, who survived him by one year.

The year 1532 was a watershed. In it was reprinted, possibly for the last time in unreformed state, the old Churchbook or directory for public worship, called the Festival. This consisted chiefly of extracts from the Golden Legend, or book of the biography of the saints. Images were commended as signs or means whereby men could learn whom they should worship and follow in living, though to do God's worship to them was forbidden.

The recently invented printing press meant that the Bible was more universally available and was even appearing in vernacular languages. Secular histories, genealogies and stories previously confined to the oral tradition were being written up and disseminated. Literacy and printing were creating a new market, the scale of which is not clear, but Sir Thomas More thought that four out of five people could read. This was probably true only of London, where it was thought that 40% could read Latin. These events posed problems for the authorities in that there were more and more sessions at which troublesome people could present unapproved works, or unauthorised people could interpret approved texts. Books were still scarce and there was not the quiet one-to-one ratio of book to reader that we have in modern times.

The Festival must have provided inspiration for miracle plays, saints' festivals, and medieval art. By 1532 the productions carried out were becoming contentious, either because they were going too far, or because the availability of the Bible in printed form was revealing inconsistencies and reformers and Protestants were seizing upon them. Even reformers were writing pieces to expose the material to public derision by the use of satire. When we return to our man in Dun Cruin, then, we know that Woulfe had said the translation to Cnáimhsighe from cnámh was wrong and that he had brought Cnáimhseach into the picture as 2

a woman's name. We know that the woman's name explanation is not fully persuasive, however, for Brian Bonner has evidence of examples where the name Cnáimhseach was given to men, not women. One of them was another back-from-the-dead story in Donegal oral tradition, this time where the man Cnáimhseach was recalled to tell forgotten tales. We know also from Mr Bonner that cnáimhseach is rarely used in the written language for midwife, and is not used in the spoken language. Most of all, we know in the Connla story we may be looking at a satire.

First, there was no publishers' footnote indicating Manus' source for the Connla story. Second, whatever the name's origin, Manus must have known that the sixth century era of St Columba was far too early to have produced a surname. These reputedly began with Brian Boru, four hundred years later. Cnáimhsighe was the only example in the book. Third, Manus must have known that the resurrection of Connla broke a rule in Betha Colaim Chille. The saint restores 18 people to life, including Connla, on a total of eleven occasions - enough incidents for us to know what constituted normal practice. There were constraints. 'There be three sods that none may escape, the sod of his birth, the sod of his death, and the sod of his burying'. Normal practice was that Columcille should intervene quickly at the place of death. There should be some or all of prayers before the event; a sign of the cross over the breast of the dead person; thanks to God after the event; and magnification God's name and Columcille's. On two occasions, Columcille restored to life someone long dead. One was Fergus mac Rioch, who had been dead since the time of Christ, and who was needed to recount the tale of the Cattle Raid of Cualnge. Columcille fasted to God beforehand, and Fergus returned to his tomb afterward, not escaping the sod of his burial. In summary then, one could say that St Columba did 16 resuscitations, one séance, which was Fergus, and one act which was nothing short of magical Connla.

That cnáimhseach is not used in the spoken language for midwife, and may be used of men, supports my position that the word has an earlier origin, and perhaps belongs to an Indo-European group of words associated with bringing into life. As such, it would be just as valid for it to be used for resurrection as for birth, and for men in appropriate circumstances, as well as women. In the back-from-the-dead story Mr Bonner refers to, there is a man Cnáimhseach, but not a specific mention of bones. Manus O'Donnell's story is the other way around: specific mention of bones: cnamhaibh aimsir (foda) - a (long) time in bones, but no mention of Cnáimhseach. Manus must have been to Iona and been familiar with Scottish Gaels. His public would have known that cnaimhseag was a local plant. Some may have known of its medicinal properties. They would have taken cnamhaibh aimsir to be a play on words. So now did I. Thus alerted, I looked for other oddities in the Connla story. 2

Fourth, why does Betha Colaim Chille need to include the Connla story at all? The story of a man being restored to life to complete an unfinished task has already been told, when in section 91 Columcille restores to life the wright of Raphoe who has drowned whilst working on the mill Columcille was having built there. If a duplicate theme needs to be in, why does it need to account for the origin of the name of an unimportant Donegal clan? Why does the explanation need to be wrong? Why cnamhaibh aimsir and not Cnáimhseach?

are one or two St John figures of speech early in Betha Colaim Chille, and a few more towards the end, but the Connla story is the only resurrection story in Betha Colaim Chille with an explicit Lazarus connection. It seems that the Connla story has to have everything. Betha Colaim Chille would of course have been read as extracts. It is a narrative of anecdotes one following the other. Eighth, St Patrick orders a casket where he might hold in safeguard not only the Gospels, but also the 'many relics of the saints'. Yet St Patrick was the first saint. Even if there had been one or two people in Ireland earlier than himself whom he wanted to honour, there is no reason why he should want to concentrate their relics in the one place, and there could not have been 'many' anyway.

Fifth, the incident takes place outside the Cnáimhsighe heartland. Betha Colaim Chille refers to 'sand dunes by the sea in the Ciannachta of Glenn Gemin, fast beside Druim Ceat'. Druim Ceat is on the banks of the River Roe, near Limavady, in what is now Co. Derry. Sixth, the mere sentence about the hair of the Virgin Mary is extraordinary. We would have expected this to merit a story in its own right, not just a passing comment.

The Connla story has an angel, saints, a shrine and relics. These were in good measure irrespective of whether their presence were likely or not. Just as he did with bones, if Manus wanted relics in the story, he put relics in, even a hair of the Virgin. The story has everything except piety. At Connla's restoration to life there were no prayers, no fasting, no sign of the cross, no thanks to God, and no magnification of God's name and Columcille's. And Connla escapes the sod of his burial. This story is the odd one out.

Seventh, the phrase 'Son of Eternal Life' is a typical figure of speech of the Gospel of St John. It is shocking to see it used of anyone other than Jesus, but St John is the Gospel which features the Lazarus story and it seems O'Donnell is fast-tracking his public to the context of resurrection. Jesus describes Lazarus, who had been dead just a few days, as arising as if from sleep. Those restored to life in Betha Colaim Chille are often described as arising as if from sleep, but typically they had been 'dead' only for moments or a very short time. Arising as if from sleep does not fit Connla, who had been dead for so many years. There

How would such a story have been received in the Year of Our Lord 1532? Manus' local readers and hearers knew that Cnáimhsighe did not mean 'in bone'. They would have doubted that a local clan had been created outside of the county. They knew that there would not 2

have been Christian relics to speak of before Patrick. They knew where the story of the dead man arising as if from sleep really belonged. But they gave Manus the willing suspension of disbelief that he expected of them. He expected to be indulged over St Columba being preferred to St Patrick, and for his over-promotion of the shrine of his patron saint. His public was not looking for piety. What we are looking at in this portion of Betha Colaim Chille is the material of an entertainer. Superficially the Connla story is about just another medieval saint restoring just another guy to life, but in some way it was meant to be funny.

people from London would go to Dublin. I think there were two reasons why there had to be relics needing to be safeguarded. One was to call for the services of a craftsman whose seed had to be Cnáimhsighe, with the meaning that Manus had given the name. The other I shall come to shortly. But where is the humour in the Connla story, and what was the joke? To see the joke we have to get to know O'Donnell's sense of humour. He wrote epigrams, which are short poems leading to witty or ingenious endings. He wrote them about local Observant Friars when their practice fell short of the stern code of conduct they preached and should have 'observed'.

There was a place for humour in those days. The medieval Church had its festive and 'misrule' side. York, then the second city of England, provides an illustration. It was not very well chronicled, but we get some idea from what was abolished in the Reformation. Christmas Eve was called Yule. The 'rude and barbarous' custom of Yule and Yule's Wife was abolished in 1572. A boy bishop was selected from the choristers for Yule into the 1570s. Before Lent, young men would scale the outside walls of York Minster and ring the 'Pancake Bell'.

In 1532 O'Donnell was a man of international stature, and there was a churchman on the international stage who was failing to practice what he preached. Edmund Bonner, or Boner, c1500 - 1569 had read law at Pembroke Hall, Oxford, and had become one of Cardinal Wolsey's chaplains. He started his career as a reformer. His attitude in the 1520s and 1530s to festive and misrule activities can only be surmised by what he did when he acquired power. It must be safe to assume he was very much against. It must have made him a butt of humour, at least in some quarters. He could be arrogant and overbearing. He so insulted the King of France that Henry VIII told him that only his own love for his master saved him from a hundred strokes with a halberd.

There were lots of churches on the eve of the Reformation. With a population at that time of only 8,000, York had 35 churches, which could presumably put on plays. London must have had four or five times more. The church plays must have been the theatre of preShakespearean England. Those in London would have been well known throughout the British Isles. Many 2

Despite his pretensions as a reformer, in the years to 1532 Bonner was committed to the King's 'Great Matter', the campaign to divorce the popular Queen Catharine. This had begun in 1526 or 1527, though it began discreetly. Bonner was sent as lobbyist to the papal court. He is known to have held Clement VII in contempt, so one can imagine his reception. He stayed there until 1533 when the King had married Anne Boleyn anyway. He sent seeds to Thomas Cromwell for his gardens. This may not have been all that he sent back.

could make fun of the friars in the order he had founded. As an international player therefore, could he not have similarly poked fun at Bonner? He knew the type, and would have known how to wind him up and to get a laugh out of him. Saying that a shrine was associated with two saints and the relics of many more; treating the crafting of a casket as serious enough for an angel's appearance and for a saint to restore a dead man to life, are factors that would have incensed any reformer in any circumstances. All the material is provocative. O'Donnell leads up to the witty or ingenious ending of 'cnamhaibh aimsir', of whose seed is the clan Cnáimhsighe. This makes Cnáimhsighe the Irish for Bonner. In the Connla story, O'Donnell has therefore not only set a scene to infuriate reformers, he has inferred that the King of England's number one errand boy was actually descended from one of the fantastic events he was trying to stop people from believing in, or enacting.

The King was working on a press and pulpit campaign to justify the Great Matter, and in 1531 a massive work appeared entitled 'The Determination of the most famous and excellent Universities of Italy and France that it is unlawful for a man to marry his brother's wife and that the Pope has no power to dispense therewith'. The Great Matter was still low profile, and there was no mention of Henry or Catharine in the work. The continental universities were eight in number, and the 'Determination' was apparently produced by theologians and canon lawyers of the King's Council. The opinions had been collected in 1530, and it seems reasonable to suspect that Bonner had a hand in collecting them: he was on the spot and he knew what to look for. In 1532 Bonner was about 32 years old.

Cnáimhsighe no more meant bones than Bonner did, but it recalled the backfrom-the-dead legend. Bonner/Boner was so obviously asking for a nickname based on bone. In England at the time, nicknames and puns on names were commonplace: the 'l' in Walter was not pronounced at that time, and there are many contemporary puns linking Walter Raleigh to 'water'. Assuming nicknaming was not confined to English humour, we can see that the legend could be pinned on Edmund Bonner by dropping Cnáimhseach and substituting cnamhaibh aimsir. Who was Bonner to talk about getting rid of relics and say what marriages were valid? And it was

This was a conflict of practice with theory of a type to attract the wit of Manus O'Donnell. Dr Bradshaw has shown the strong contact at the time between Donegal and Europe, including Rome. Bonner's delegation would have been topical in the years leading up to 1532. As a local nobleman O'Donnell 1

not just satire that Edmund Bonner had to face as time went by. The Bishop of Ossory's comments were not meant as a joke.

Head on Earth of Church Ireland. In 1541 he assumed the title of King of Ireland, instructing his Irish Council to get on with the work of reformation.

The presentation of something as its own opposite was evidently done in the best circles in the sixteenth century. In his 1597 play, Henry IV part 1, Shakespeare chose a sober Protestant, martyred on a Christmas Day, as the model for Falstaff. He started by using the man's real name, Sir John Oldcastle, but responded to Oldcastle's family pressure to change it, as he was presenting the character as a sort of 'Lord of Misrule'. Given that Columcille was the first saint in Ireland whose life was known in detail, that he was the man who finished the conversion of Ireland to Christianity and who established the Faith in Scotland and much of England, it would have been appropriate that he should be the subject of the first printed book in Irish. Why do we not read that the famous Manus O'Donnell was author and editor of the first printed work in the Irish language, say somewhere around 1534? Instead, the job remained manuscript on vellum, 120 pages, 17.5 inches by 11. Why did not Manus follow through?

A proclamation in 1536 ordered the surrender of any publication spread abroad 'in derogation and diminution of the dignity and authority of the King s majesty and his imperial crown'. (It had become 'imperial' in case 'royal' implied subservience to the Pope.) Whilst Henry VIII was acting against images, relics and shrines, saints and saints' days, and was proclaiming himself head of the Church in Ireland, O'Donnell was assembling an opposition - the Geraldine League - extending from Munster through the Anglo-Irish of the Pale to James V of Scotland. He sent agents to the Pope requesting ships and artillery so that he could lead a crusade against the 'Anti-Christ of England'. Bonner in the meantime was rising in stature as well. In 1538 he became Bishop of Hereford and ambassador to Paris. In 1539 he became Bishop of London. In 1542 he recorded the incidence of certain practices in his diocese by prohibiting them. Amongst other items there was an injunction against any manner of plays, games or interludes within churches or chapels.

Other considerations imposed themselves. In May 1532, Sir Thomas More, resigned as Henry VIII's chancellor. In November Pope Clement VII excommunicated the King. In 1534 Parliament cast off the authority of the Pope and Henry proclaimed himself Supreme Head on Earth of Church of England. In 1537, Henry's Church acted against images, relics and shrines. In 1536 he proclaimed himself Supreme

In 1543 Parliament followed the London diocesan injunctions with an 'Act for the Advancement of True Religion and for the Abolishment of the Contrary'. Severe penalties were detailed for arrogant and ignorant persons who had been propagating perverse fancies in subversion of the true doctrine in Scripture, not just by teaching and preaching, but 'by printed books, ballads, rhymes, songs and other fantasies'. 2

Prepared to be a national Catholic, Bonner was never a Protestant. His diocese became the centre of Protestantism. As 'Bloody Mary's' Bishop of London, from 1553 to 1558, 113 of the reign's 300 Protestant martyrs were down to him. 113 against the London population of the time would be the equivalent of thousands today. He was of course very unpopular in London, and would have been well remembered. Bonner died in 1569, with his head still on his shoulders, having retired from public life when Elizabeth came to the throne.

Similar events were taking place in Scotland, where, in 1543, 1549 and 1552, there are references to slanderous bills, writings, ballads and books circulating to defame the Church and churchmen. No examples of this material survived there. By the decrees of the Council of Trent, 1547 - 1563, Rome itself corrected many of the abuses complained about throughout Europe. Had it appeared in print, the Connla story would surely have been an example of a kind of publication the Act of 1543 made illegal, and its author an example of the perceived kind of person propagating such material.

In the preface of Betha Colaim Chille, Manus had lamented the loss of many early sources of history because of the depredations of the Vikings. He lived to see the same thing happen again. In 1561 the Scottish Parliament, to suit the Scottish Reformed Church, passed an Act against the remaining abbeys and monasteries. Iona was destroyed, with great loss of ancient Irish and Scottish archive material. O'Donnell died two years after the destruction of the heritage founded by his ancestor and patron saint, in the year that would have been the abbey's millennium.

As political humour, O'Donnell's 'inbones' story would have had a limited life. It could have begun to gain currency anytime from 1527 when Henry began seeking an annulment and Bonner was in the delegation. It would have continued after 1533 when Bonner returned to England. Its 'best-before' date would have been 1547 when Bonner, seeing that the Reformation was turning into revolution, and that the Papacy was worth fighting for even if the Pope was not, changed his views. With or without accompanying songs and rhymes, the Connla story would have spread all over the realm. Apprentices and young craftsmen were widely travelled. Everybody would know the pun on cnámh to produce Bonner. When it came to choosing an anglicised form for Cnáimhsighe a hundred years later the name Bonner would have been already familiar in Donegal.

Manus had abandoned the Geraldine League in the late 1540s. He was amongst the first of the Gaelic lords to respond to Henry VIII's conciliatory 'surrender and regrant' initiative, though in Donegal the process did not get beyond the stage of 'agreement in principle'. Dr Bradshaw says that 'it needs to be explained why such a dazzling early career as that of Manus O'Donnell entered upon such a lengthy eclipse late 1

in the 1540s with so little achieved for the lordship'. His main explanation is ill health and, by the standards of the time, old age.

during his lifetime. Within ten years of his death, Gaelic appeared in print in Scotland in the form of Knox's Common Order; and in Ireland as Kearney's Gaelic Alphabet Catechism. A fissure had opened across Columcille's Christendom and across the Gaelic language.

I videoed the repeat of Kenneth Clark's 1968 'Civilisation' TV series to see what Lord Clark had to say about the period. 'What could an intelligent, human, openminded man do in mid sixteenth century Europe?' asks Lord Clark. 'Keep quiet, work in solitude, outwardly conform, inwardly remain free. The wars of religion evoked a figure new to European civilisation ... the intellectual recluse.' Perhaps it was just old age and infirmity that caused Manus' eclipse. Perhaps he began to think it prudent to have a low profile. Perhaps a low profile was thrust upon him. We can see that the printing of a saint's life by Manus after Henry became King of Ireland would have been an act of brinkmanship.

It might even be that Betha Colaim Chille survived the Reformation because it was in Irish and in manuscript, rather than in English and in print. Betha Colaim Chille must soon have slipped into obscurity. The readers and hearers for whom it was intended had little time left to them. The Gaelic chieftains of Ulster were broken at the Battle of Kinsale, Co Cork, in 1601. Their Province was then opened up for plantation. In 1607, Manus' grandson Rory, by then with the English title of 1st Earl of Tyrconnell, and Hugh O'Neill, 2nd Earl of Tyrone, led over ninety of Ulster's once powerful families from Lough Swilly into exile in Italy. This famous 'Flight of the Earls' marks the end of the native aristocracy. Betha Colaim Chille, amongst other Irish documents, was bought for a small sum by a Mr Rawlinson from a collection in 1766-67. He deposited it in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Work on editing and translating was begun by Henebry and O'Kelleher, in the Zeitshrift für Celtische Philologie between 1901 and 1914. In 1916 the Irish Fellowship Club of Chicago took over. A Research Fellowship was set up at the University of Chicago and O'Kelleher was appointed to it. This resulted in the publication of 1918.

It had dawned on me that the timing of Betha Colaim Chille could have made it the first book to be printed in Gaelic. The invention of the printing press was beginning to have an impact on the languages of Europe. The book could have reaffirmed the unity of the Gaelic language, as Irish and Scottish vernaculars had not yet appeared. A biography of St Columba of Iona would have been in demand in Scotland as well as Ireland in a way that no other subject matter would. With it, O'Donnell could well have done for Gaelic what Dante's Divine Comedy was doing for Italian, and what his contemporary, Luther, would do for German with his new Bible. The Reformation pressures which culminated in the destruction of Iona were probably responsible for confining his Life of St Columba to manuscript

To preserve the 'period' feel of the work, O'Kelleher and Schoepperle left much of 2

Manus' Irish as it was, just modernising his spellings enough to make the work intelligible to the twentieth century reader of Irish. For the same effect, they translated it into a simulated sixteenth century English. Had it actually been rendered into such English at the time, I daresay its chances of survival would have been very much diminished. The Dictionary of the Irish Language would have been very much the poorer, and the trail that I have been following would have been lost forever.

I think that the pseudo-translation to Bonner was a by-product of these events. By an irony of fate, Bonner's infamy would have been brought with the Protestant settlers to the very edge of the Cnáimhsighe heartland. In 1609 land in Derry was granted to the Corporation of London. Maybe the seventeenth century official was not being helpful or complimentary when he labelled a local sept as Bonner. Five of their number had been implicated though cleared in the 1608 Ó Dochartaigh rebellion. On the other hand, perhaps they were pleased to be associated with Bonner, now the enemy of the enemy, and took the initiative to change the name themselves. It is likely the name was adopted in speech earlier than the first written record of Boner in 1665.

If the bearberry explanation of the origin of the name is correct, then the line of the Connla story, 'And of his seed is the clan Cnáimhsighe ', makes sense without any 'be reason'. Though the word 'seed' is often used in Betha Colaim Chille in the sense of offspring, given Edmund Bonner's gardening interest, it would have helped the parody for those in the know.

Some words fit the bill. The two-piece bathing costume for women appeared at the same time as nuclear bombs were being tested at Bikini Atoll. As a marketing ploy and because of its 'explosive' effect at the time, the swimsuit was called the bikini. The new word might quickly have died back, except that beginning in 'bi', it looked like it belonged to an established family of words where 'bi' means two, e.g. binocular, bicycle, even though it did not.

Manus O'Donnell was not just capable of wit, he was renowned for it. He knew all the main players on the European stage from Donegal to Rome. If his 'Life of Columcille' lacks humour, it is the only one of his works without it. This interpretation of Manus O'Donnell's treatment of Betha Colaim Chille differs from that of Dr Bradshaw. Identifying many Renaissance characteristics in Manus O'Donnell, Bradshaw nevertheless says that in his Life of St Columba, Manus displays a medieval naivety to the writings he assembled on saints' lives. If I am right, then Bradshaw need not make this exception in O'Donnell's qualities as a Renaissance man.

The Connla legend would have been to the clan name what Bikini Atoll was to the swimsuit. After the launch the word was on its own. Bonner was a natural. It is simple. It harks back to the legend; it sounds 'good' to anyone familiar with Latin or the Romance languages; and it appears to be Anglo-Norman, which is high status in both Ireland and England. An Anglicisation was called for, it might 1

as well be this, and true or false, such a name was likely to gather a momentum in its own right. The word is an adman's dream. No wonder it achieved a 90% market share.

2

Crampsie and Kneafsey - Variations in Gaelic

Gaelic spelling of these is cnoc. There are three cnocs in northern Donegal. One has an English spelling of Knock Knockalla; but two have come into English as Crock - Crocknasmug in Inishowen and Crocknafaragh further west. There are no other Crocks anywhere else in Ireland. Hence the 'cr' of Crampsie.

Ó Cnáimhsighe has evolved into Crampsie and Kneafsey, two very different looking names. I therefore wanted to get Gaelic pronunciations of Cnáimhsighe. I got Creevshi from a man from Derry who had taken Irish to the UK General Certificate of Education 'Advanced' level standard. He told me there was no other way of pronouncing the word. I got Cnaweevshi in Mayo.

We do get Celtic-origin placenames for 'hill' in England with both 'cr' and 'cn' forms. We have many placenames of Crook either alone or in compound form, and we have 'cn' examples in Knock in Westmorland and Cannock in Staffordshire. There is at least one example of a completely English, or Anglo-Norse word, having an 'n' to 'r' mutation, when Dun Holm became Durham. We have an 'r' falling silent when the eighth century Grantaceaster became Grantabricg, then Cranta- then Canta- and finally Cambridge.

I then tried 'cnaimhseag' on two native speakers of Scottish Gaelic. One was from Glencoe, Argyll, and the other from the Isle of Harris. Neither had encountered the word before, so the spoken language can get by without it. I got 'c'aeemsig', almost like coymsig, from Glencoe, and 'cneyepshi' from Harris (eye as in eye-to-eye.) The second letter of cnáimh/cnaimh may therefore be pronounced as 'n' or 'r' or be silent; the vowels of cnáimh/cnaimh may be awee, ee, or eye; and the 'mh' may be 'v', 'm', or 'p'. The 's' of '-sighe' or 'seag' may be pronounced as 's' or as 'sh'.

The Spellings of Kneafsey The 'c' or 'k' of Cnawsie was presumably pronounced in 1665 when the name was encountered by the compilers of the Donegal Hearth Rolls. 'K's now silent in English words were pronounced at that time. A 'c' before an 'r' would remain, however.

Gaelic therefore has its dialects. An authoritative explanation of the 'n' to 'r' mutation is to be found in Micheal Ó Siadhal, who tells us that an 'n' in a word such as cnoc in the Gaelic of Donegal and Mayo is denasalised into 'r'. On placename evidence, the denasalisation must be more extensive in Donegal than elsewhere, including Mayo. Looking at the transliteration of placenames in the index of a detailed map, (Readers' Digest, seven miles to 1 inch), there are in Ireland some 44 placenames which are Knock or Knock-something, and the

The predominant spellings in the West are Kneafsey and Neafsey. It is unsurprising that there should be Kneafsey as such in Dublin. There are seven households in the Dundalk/Drogheda area and one in Dublin that are spelt Neasy or Neacy. This is 24% of the total and seems enough to have a separate history. Did 1

these Dundalk/Drogheda families come direct from Ulster at some early stage? There must be a strong presumption against a direct move from Donegal to Louth. Had there been an early migration it would have been picked up in the historical sources set out in the Dates and Events table. Had there been a migration here from Donegal in the last hundred years there would have been an intermixture of Bonners and possibly Crampsies. The presence of Kneafsey alone, however it may be spelt, means a move from the West.

firstborn of another family had been spelt Neassy in 1869. Subsequent children of both families, from 1872 onwards, were spelt Neafsey. Some standardisation was therefore beginning to appear and it coincides exactly with the introduction by law of compulsory universal education. Written surnames would have become something to be encountered by someone in almost every family almost every day. The standardisation was not yet finally settled however. A younger sister of my grandfather, baptised Neafsey in 1877, left a photograph of herself as a young woman, on which she signed herself Ellen Neafcy. She married and also left Ireland. The 'K' came back, certainly in the family we left behind and presumably in others, at some later stage.

There may be a clue to 'when' they came to the east coast in the spelling. Five of them are spelt Neacy and three are Neasy. This variant is not absent from Connaught, for there is a Neacy in Sligo. Apart from its similar numbers to the Neacys/Neasys of the east coast of Ireland, the spelling and pronunciation variants of my own surname may provide a comparable. The Lancashire spelling of Kneafsey is Neafcy. My grandfather left Séan Mhachaire about a hundred years ago, probably well before he was 20 years old. He died before his eldest children were old enough to take an interest in where they were coming from, so there was no-one around to answer questions when they were. The family knew of the Mayo spelling and did not know why he had changed it. Our assumption was that perhaps an official in England had misspelt it and that the teenage countryboy had decided to live with it rather than try to correct it. This turns out not to he so.

What may have happened for those who stayed in Connaught is that compulsory education and improved awareness of history led to degenerate spelling forms being discarded and more enlightened variants restored. The Neafcys now mainly of Lancashire were in Connaught for the start of the process but left before it was complete. Under the influence of movements in Ireland, some have since reintroduced an initial 'K', and we now have two spellings in England, neither of which is to be found in the Irish telephone directories. Pronunciation has been affected by spelling over the last 100 years or so as compulsory mass education has been introduced This applies to Kneafsey as to many everyday words. I remember from the 1950s and 1960s that older generation people who knew our name from Ireland were likely to pronounce it

According to the Knock Baptismal Book, my grandfather's eldest sister was christened Mary Navisey in 1870. The 2

Nacey, however or if ever, they spelt it. The Neacys/Neasys of Dundalk/Drogheda may be a comparable story, in which case one would expect that they were from Connaught and left a century or more ago. Perhaps railway workers rather than railway passengers to the emigrant ships?

slight. By the time of Philip MacShane y Neasy, around 1600, there were about 1.25 million people in Ireland. Another hundred years later, when Father Kneafsey of Achadh Mór was 50, in l700, the population had risen to 2.5 million. It now included l00,000 Protestants from Britain, three quarters of them Lowland Scots, who had been settled in the 'plantation' of Ulster, plus their families raised in Ireland.

Thoughts in Closing Why did Kneafsey not feature as a name in Cunard's records? All one can say is that such records were not exhaustive. The 15 year old son of Ellen Neafcy of Shanvaghera and Bartley Swift of Coogue sailed from Liverpool to Philadelphia on April 13th 1922 in the 11,600 ton White Star steamer Haverford. His name does not appear in the passenger list of that trip. There are Kneafseys of quite long standing in America, and they must have got there by steamship. But they would be few, and maybe were missed like the young Michael Swift.

If this l00,000 is related to the population of its country of destination, Ireland, it is 4%. If it is related to its countries of origin, it was 0.4% of the 5.75 million population of England and Wales in 1700, but 7.5% of the one million population of Scotland. Applying these percentages to today's populations, it would mean Scotland exporting 383,000 people, say all the inhabitants of Tayside Region; and England and Wales exporting 203,000, say the inhabitants of the City of Derby. Ulster had been the destination of half of all the 200,000 emigrants from Britain in the seventeenth century. The others had gone to the eastern seaboard of North America, where their numbers had reached 280,000 in 1700. Together with a few thousand French further north, the American colonists were on the edge of a land mass 240 times the size of Ireland, yet whose vast extent had a native population only a half that of Ireland. The real Land of Opportunity would soon be recognised.

Only a few characters have featured in this story. Without trying to pursue details, it is worth attempting briefly an overview of the Ireland each of them would have known. The island that Scannlán traversed in the late eleventh century contained only about 400,000 people, mainly Gaelic, with some Scandinavian Ostmen on east coast settlements. In the next century the country began to be penetrated by Norman lords from England, looking for new domains. Whatever the cultural effects of the Anglo-Normans had, theirs was not a folk-migration and the demographic effects were probably

Whether or not the movement of 4% of population into Ireland or that of 7.5% out of Scotland was large scale, it was a scale that was dwarfed by the flight from Ireland in the nineteenth century. At the 2

time of my grandfather's birth in October 1874 the population of Ireland was 5.25 million. He left for Glasgow at most twenty years later, not too far from the date of December 1893 when the first steamship specially adapted for the emigrant trade left Liverpool for Philadelphia. By l900, the population of Ireland was down to 4.5 million, a fall of 14% in the quarter century.

from before the Roman occupation of Spain. I had not expected to be able to put Shanvaghera in the same sentence as Las Vegas, but it can be done. Answers to Questions Enough information has now been put together to provide answers for the questions posed at the beginning of this piece.

Despite all the movement in and out, the l990/9l telephone directories illustrate the continued existence of a long standing settlement pattern in Ireland, even amongst a clan that was disturbed both by the Ulster Plantation and the nineteenth century Famine. When people from the west of Ireland move, they emigrate. Men from Co. Mayo may well be found, as the song goes, in Boston, Chicago, Detroit and Toronto, but they are much less likely to be found elsewhere in Ireland, apart from Dublin and its environs. The map shows the same applies to Donegal people as well. As my grandfather never returned, Knock and Achadh Mór would have been all that he knew of Ireland. A hundred years have passed since his departure from Achadh Mór and that is another story. Before closing this one I should like to share another thought.

The need to put the Kneafseys of Knock and Achadh Mór into a perspective with the rest of the clan meant finding the numbers and distribution of all three Ó Cnáimhsighe derivatives: Kneafsey, Crampsie and Bonner. This could have been a problem, in that the great majority of the clan's families are now called Bonner, which is not a single source name. Scottish and Palatine Bonners could have confused the settlement pattern and the numbers. The problem did not arise. Whatever their historical significance, descendants of the seventeenth century settlers called Bonner do not appear as clusters on the map in the areas in which they settled. The distribution maps of the three Cnáimhsighe derivatives show that the Kneafseys of east Mayo are part of a clan whose core area is Donegal. The Mayo families are now the biggest cluster still retaining a Gaelic version of the name. We can now explain how they came by the name, and how they came to be where they are.

I was interested to hear Joe Byrne describe Shanvaghera as the 'old plain by the river'. I knew 'shan' to mean 'old'. I had taken it to be from the same Indo-European source that produced 'senior' and its equivalent in other languages. 'Plain by the river' had to be 'vaghera', which would then have the same meaning as the Spanish 'vega'. Checking on that, vega in old Spanish was vaica or vaiga, being a Celtic word

Whether we are looking at fact or fable, the story begins in the time of St Columba, in the sixth century. Taking fact first, Gaelic people from Ireland were then settling in the Highlands and 2

Isles of Scotland. They already had the name of a mountain heather of localised distribution in Ireland which they found more widespread in Scotland. In Scotland the name would eventually be committed to writing and find its way into the dictionary as cnaimhseag - the bearberry.

that the children of a woman called Heather took her name.

In Ireland also the name would find its way into the dictionary, but not as a plant: Cnáimhseach means midwife, and is a word hardly ever used. Cnaimhseag and Cnáimhseach seem to be kindred words, and the medicinal properties of the bearberry prove a connection. Most women today before and after childbirth are given oxytocin. The bearberry is or was a source of oxytocin. A midwife, in Irish, bean chabharta, attended a birth and no doubt administered as necessary a substance containing oxytocin all those years ago. In pre-modern times, speed in a delivery was even more important than it is today, being the best if not only safety or pain control measure available. Folk medicines were used, prayers, charms, amulets, sympathetic language and body language by all supporting the birth.

The lack of a word for bearberry in Irish dictionaries does not mean that the Irish managed without a word for the plant, just that the name was not picked up by the dictionary makers. It may be lost now, or it may survive in a dialect somewhere.

The distribution of the cnaimhseag, or bearberry, in Ireland, on northern and western coastal areas, matches well with that of the surnames derived from Cnáimhsighe.

The surname may not however have been exclusively or even mainly a matronymic in its origin. In Donegal oral tradition there are men called Cnáimhseach, and at least one of them in legend was brought back from the dead. The bearberry may have provided some symbolism used in the legend. But, mother or midwife, woman or man, brought back from the dead or not, Cnáimhsighe came from someone called originally after the bearberry. Scannlán Ó Cnáimhsighe appeared in the records in 1095, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The Royal Irish Academy's dictionary of the Irish Language cross references Cnáimhseach the midwife with our surname. (Cnáimhsighe may be taken to be the plural of cnáimhseach.) Woulfe says that Cnáimhseach was a woman's personal name, which made Cnáimhsighe a matronymic and thus one of Ireland's few such names. It therefore looks as if a midwife was sometimes called after one of her medicines - or the plant itself. If Cnáimhsighe began as a matronymic, then what happened was

A small proportion of the clan, which I get to be about 6%, moved to Connaught, probably in the early seventeenth century, and got detached from the main population. Separated into a different speech community, a distinctive pronunciation developed. Extinct nineteenth century spellings show the contrast. We had Navisey and Neassy in Knock; whilst in Donegal there was Cnawsie, Crawsie and 2

Crevshey. The divergence may have been to do with the seventeenth century breakdown of the Irish bardic system. Vernacular forms appear when the literary and oratorical underpinning of a language is lost. Scottish Gaelic and the modern Irish dialects soon came to the surface. Judging by how they pronounce cnaimhseag, a Scottish Gaelic pronunciation of Cnáimhsighe would be different again. It might be said that Kneafsey is closer in pronunciation to Cnáimhseach, and Crampsie closer to cnaimhseag.

something he had heard. After reading about him, his erudition, his ambitions, his interests, I could not suggest that ignorance played much of a part in his actions. I was therefore driven to say that the etymology he provided was knowingly wrong. So whilst I agree that there was a pseudo-translation linking Bonner with Cnáimhsighe, I think it was not a translation of Cnáimhsighe via cnámh into Bonner. It was a rendering in Betha Colaim Chille of Bonner into Irish as cnamhaibh aimsir, a 'double entendre' putting Edmund Bonner at the centre of the very kind of saints' story he and his royal master were trying to stamp out. Just as with his epigrams of local Observant Friars, O'Donnell was making mirth at the expense of those who did not practise what they preached. Satire was in fashion in 1532 when the book was compiled. O'Donnell was not simply a man of local significance. He was a figure of international standing, and international politics would have been just as much grist to his mill as local issues.

The form Kneafsey appears to have been a relatively recent and educated restoration in Mayo from earlier uninformed versions. Those of us abroad with what I now see as a nineteenth century spelling may be descended from people who left Connaught relatively early. Though the time span is immense, there seems to me no difficulty with a lineage from a woman called Heather, in an area where that heather grows, to the surnames Kneafsey and Crampsie. The time it took to establish the links was prolonged by consideration of the name Bonner - the fable and the fun.

Had O'Donnell wanted simply a name for someone descended from bones in his Betha Colaim Chille story, why not MacCnámhaigh? He may not have known this name. He was from Donegal, not Antrim, and in any case the Cnáimhsighe derivatives are today twenty times more numerous than the MacCnámhaigh derivative, so the ratio could have been of the same order in the sixteenth century. Still, it would have been a sounder translation, though even here we must not forget that bones could be geological rather than anatomical, and Antrim has its mountains.

Confronted in Ulster with pressures which were not brought to bear in Connaught, the clan in Donegal anglicised their name. Why did they not choose Heath or Burberry? Why Bonner? This brought me to Betha Colaim Chille and Manus O'Donnell. Second generation English born, my first reaction was to say that as a man of that time, O'Donnell did not know the facts, that he had either made up the 'in bones' explanation, or passed on uncritically 2

MacCnámhaigh was not an option because O'Donnell needed the provenance of the Cnáimhseach legend. The seed had to be Cnáimhsighe to achieve this. The name Cnáimhseach had to be out of it, because the true origin of Cnáimhsighe would have spoiled the story.

who are Crampsie suggests a pronunciation surprising to us who are Kneafseys overseas. Perhaps it is influenced by the Irish spelling, but, certainly in those variants without the 'p', it would be probably be recognisable by Scots Gaels who know their heather. Mass education and literacy has probably stopped the drift from Crampsie to Bonner now.

It seems likely that O'Donnell would have been conscious of the impending millennium of the abbey of Iona. A Life of St Columba would have been a way of commemorating it, especially written by one of the saint's family. Manus must have embarked upon the Life with a sense of optimism. As the years went by, he must have developed a sense of foreboding that the Gaelic aristocracy would be lucky to survive, let alone provide him with a readership. If I am right about the Connla story, it is possible that Manus would have edited it out had the manuscript been sent to the printers.

The lore of the bearberry might not have been much of a loss, but it does show what is at stake in loss of habitat elsewhere in the world today, where new economic demands result in the sidelining of long established cultures. It is not simply individual words, but entire languages that can be put at risk, with the loss of centuries of accumulated knowledge. We can never know how many words for bearberry there are or have been, in what must be dozens of languages from the Lapps to the Ainu to the Eskimo and the American Indians. Many will have disappeared already along with the languages to which they belonged.

Whether they were abandoning bearberry, bone or some other idea, the Cnáimhsighes did not abandon their Gaelic name abruptly. It occurred over two centuries or more. Probably individual persons would have used Bonner on occasions before the first written records. Then they would use it for official purposes. Then the occasions requiring its use would become more frequent. A Gaelic derivative would long persist in the spoken tongue, as it still does in Inishowen, but 98% of the Ulster families would officially become Bonner. The spellings of the other 2%

This is our story as it seems to me in 1993. I do not expect the story to be beyond criticism or correction, either for things I have missed or for material I have got wrong or misjudged. Edward Neafcy York 1993

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Addendum, April 1994

Recalling Brian Bonner's observation that cnáimhseach is not used for midwife in the spoken language and seldom in the written, it may be that cnáimhseach itself as midwife was a local word only which has been given more prominence by inclusion in the dictionary. Woulfe makes no mention of midwife in his entry for Ó Cnáimhsighe. He used popular speech for his surname research: Irish speakers who had fled the Famine, and were still alive in south Lancashire, up to a hundred years ago. His 'Irish Names and Surnames' came out only in 1923, delayed many years by funding problems and the World War. Woulfe sees the woman's name Cnáimhseach as the feminine equivalent of the man's name Cnáimhin, which he says produced Ó Cnáimhin and MacCnáimhin, and then Navin, Nevin or Bowen. He says the connection between Cnáimhin and bones is conjectural. He puts inverted commas around the word 'translation' when he refers to the name 'Bonner' in relation to Cnáimhsighe, no doubt because if the connection is conjectural for one, it is conjectural for the other. He puts Ó Cnáimhsighe into his surname category I. This is the most numerous and oldest category - a name based on the name of an ancestor.

Facts continue to emerge There is after all an Irish word for the bearberry - lus na stalóg; This is found in Dinneen's and in O'Neill Lane's Irish dictionaries. An Irish equivalent of cnaimhseag could have co-existed along with this. Wales, with a fairly small heather habitat, has three words for bearberry, and I have now come across about a dozen words in British and American English. One of them is mealberry, so there is an English equivalent of the Scandinavian words. Lus na stalóg evokes a picture of bell shaped flowers bent over like horses' heads. It is distinctive in that it is descriptive of the blossom, whereas names in other languages concentrate more on the properties of the plant or berry. It may be a folk word, or it may be a construction of the lexicographers. I am put in mind of possible constructions by lexicographers by 'Meyer's Contributions to Irish Lexicography'. According to this, there is a word cnáimhseoir which means male midwife. Whilst the building blocks of language allow such a word to be built up, I do not see that there would have been enough need for such specialists for the word to have evolved naturally. Obstetricians came into the picture as men, but this was later and they would have been unlikely to have much if anything to do with the methods they were supplanting. This must apply as well to cnáimhseachas, midwifery.

Professor Ó Broin of Galway suggests that cnáimhseach is both a personal name and an occupational name. The structure of the word would be 'cnáimh' plus the feminine suffix 'seach'. It would be a euphemism for midwife in the same way as another term, bean glúine, 'woman of the knee'. Refering since to Gélis' 'History of Childbirth', I am happy 1

with 'woman of the knee', but even if cnáimh could be reconciled with midwifery, which I am not happy with, I do not see why 'woman' should be downgraded to just a suffix. Why not bean cnáimh? Further, neither bones nor midwifery explains the distribution of the surname Ó Cnáimhsighe, but the bearberry does. The thought persists for me that cnáimhseach was not an amalgamation of cnáimh and seach, but was a word in its own right, like it seems to be in Scottish Gaelic, and though the Scottish for bone is the same as the Irish.

unknown, it fits in well with the other parody features of the Connla story. I do not see that this story could have been amongst the genuine sources Manus collated for Betha Colaim Chille. If it is, then I have one of the oldest surnames in the world, and I should be so lucky. More likely, for mischief, he slipped a page in of his own composition, like a stonemason would slip in a secret imp in the stonework of a cathedral. Apart from the cnaimhseag, I would like to see the reactions of others to what I have said about Manus O'Donnell. Betha Colaim Chille however is not easy to come by - a book in good condition would now command a price of £165. No wonder the libraries are cautious with their copies. I fear that there will be few people who will get to have a view about it at all.

The final comments are about Betha Colaim Chille. The Ciannachta of Glenngemin became the Barony of Keenaght in Co. Derry. Connla, the personal name of the fabled founder of the clann Cnáimhsighe, was the name of Cuchulain's only son, whom the legendary Ulster hero had to slay. It had a meaning of prudent or chaste. For reasons I have explained, O'Donnell could not call his man in Dun Cruin by the name Cnáimhseach, but the name he chose was not random. It fits the parody on Edmund Bonner. Pure, Holier-thanThou, Boner descended from a fantasy.

Addendum October 2009 Brian Lacey has published his translation of O’Donnell’s ‘Life of St Columba’. O’Donnell’s Irish is not in it. The English is modern. This has its advantages but it loses something of the magic. More important for me, is that I found the site of the shrine and visited it. It was an education in itself and it’s another story, as they say. I wrote it up in ‘Of the Children of Kneafsey and the Shrine at the Pictish Fort’, also now on Scribd.

Coming back to cnámh, there is so much cross-referencing of cnáimhseach and similar names with bone, conjectural or not, that the association of Ó Cnáimhsighe with bone may have preceded O'Donnell. Whether he invented it, or earlier person or persons

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Clann Cnáimhsighe : Notable Dates and Events - Whether Fact, Fable or Fun AD 491

Death of St. Patrick after 30 year mission in Ireland

573 Connla

Convention of Drum Ceatt attended by St. Columba - possible date of incident?

1095

Scannlán Ó Cnáimhsighe died, Lismore monastery. Irish Annals.

1424

Roger Ó Cnáimhsi, Vicar of Greallach, Inishowen, Vatican archives.

1532 Betha Colaim Chille (Life of St. Columba) compiled by Manus O'Donnell - includes Connla story as origin of Clann Cnáimhsighe. 1584

Philip MacShane y Neasy, Cork.

1609 Pardon Lists following 1608 Ó Dochartaigh rebellion, five Ua Cnáimhsighe names, Séan, Aonghus, Padraig, and two Donalls, Inishowen. 1659 Knawsie.

Census lists, Donegal. MacLysaght says the name was rendered as O According to Brian Bonner, there were nine references in Inishowen,

where it was recorded as one of the principal names, and that it was not recorded as a principal name elsewhere in the county. 1663-1669

County Hearth Money Rolls 1665 Co. Donegal - MacLysaght says the spellings were O Cnawsey and O Crawsey. Brian Bonner says there were nine references, two of which

were Boner. 1666 Co. Tyrone - Brian Bonner has two references, one a Bonar and one Knogher O Cramsy. 1669 Co. Antrim - two Bonars. 1

1700 his records.

Welsh botanist, Lhuyd, finds bearberry in the Burren. He uses Latin for

1704

Father Kneafsey - priest of Achadh Mór, Co. Mayo.

1709 3,000 Palatine Protestant refugees arrive in Dublin. Many settle in Limerick. Some are called Bonner. 1753

Linnaeus publishes 'Genera Plantarum'.

1833 Co. Mayo.

Surname 'Knavesey' appears in Tithe Books for Islandeady and Meelick,

1857

Griffith Valuation

1890 five

Birth statistics noted by MacLysaght: 38 Bonner; 9 Crampsie, fewer than Kneafsey. Source is 'A Special Report on the Surnames of Ireland,

Registrar General, 1894. Bibliography 'More Irish Surnames' MacLysaght 'The Surnames of Ireland

Edward '

1982

'A Dictionary of Surnames' Hodges Oxford University Press

P Hanks and F 1988

'Clann Cnáimhsighe - A Donegal Sept' Donegal Annual,

Brian Bonner 1979

'Gaelic Etymological Dictionary'

McBain

1896 'Modern Irish'

Micheal Ó Siadhal 1989

'Manus "The Magnificent": O'Donnell as Renaissance Prince' Bradshaw Studies in Irish History Cosgrove & McCartney, 2

Brendan 1979

Dublin 'Wild Flowers' Walters

Gilmour and 1989

'Mountain Flowers'

Raven and Walters 1971

'Medicinal Plants'

Prof H Flück 1976

'The Wild Flower Finders' Calendar'

David Lang 1983

'Herbs'

Phillips and Foy 1992

'Guide to Medicines and Drugs' Medical

British Association 1991

'History of Childbirth'

Jacques Gélis 1981

'Reading the Irish Landscape'

Frank Mitchell 1986

'An Atlas of Irish History'

R D Edwards 1978

'Atlas of World Population History' Jones

McEvedy and 1978

2

DISTRIBUTION OF HOUSEHOLDS WITH TELEPHONES, IRELAND, 1990/91 Name

Donegal

Kneafsey Neafsey Neacy Neasy

0 0 0 0

Crampsey Crampsie Cramsie

2 2 0

Bonar

29

Boner Bonnar Bonner

40 12 154

Total with phones

239

Percent

54

Approx total with and without phones

443