This Irish-language chronicle covers events in Ireland from the beginning of the eleventh to the end of the sixteenth centuries. Edited and translated by the native Irish speaker and acclaimed scholar William Hennessy (c.1829–89), the work was published for the Rolls Series in 1871 and remains an important source for Irish history. Hennessy also supplied an edited and translated excerpt from a closely related chronicle, The Annals of Connacht, to supplement years missing from the edited text (1316–1412). Volume 1, prefaced with an introduction to the text and manuscripts, begins with a dramatic description of the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 and ends with an account of Irish warfare in Connacht during the middle of the fourteenth century.
