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.
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,
2
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.

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 non-
Cnáimhsighe 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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
2
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.
I essentially want to know what
proportion of the sept left Donegal for
Mayo, when and why.
Is it safe to say that 8% left, reflecting
the Kneafseys' present day 'market share'
of the sept, or has there been a distortion
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.
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%.
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
2
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
Distribution of Kneafsey
surnames: Telephone directory
economically active men than others, as
was usual with migrants. In any event,
not many people were involved.
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
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.
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.
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
2
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
2
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.
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.
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".
The Kneafseys are in or from the Kneafseys of the West missed the
Connaught. Had they come as refugees name change altogether.
from Donegal after the events of 1653,
or 1603, or were there other reasons?

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?
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.
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.
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
meaning midwife. It says Cnáimhseach
seems to be from cnámh with a feminine
ending 'seach', but that if so, the reason
is unclear.
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.
So of the two routes to a meaning for
Cnáimhsighe, one leads to the pseudo-
translation '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
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.
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.
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
2
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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 .
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
A Skeleton in the Cupboard? work he died. And
this was a great grief
The bearberry explains the connection to Padraic, for there
between cnaimhseag the source of was not in this world
oxytocin, cnáimhseach the midwife and his like of a smith.
Cnáimhseach the personal name. Why And there came to
then, when it came to selecting an him an angel and bade
anglicised name, did Cnáimhsighe not him not be sorrowful,
become Heather, or Heath, or Burberry? for it was not for him
How did Bonner get in on the act? The that God had willed
choice of Bonner is important, because that work should be
90% of the clan now have that name. completed, but for the
Bonner began to appear in writing in the son of Eternal Life, to
seventeenth century. Surely in those wit, for Columcille.
days people would not have And many years
mistranslated Gaelic words? thereafter Columcille
came to that same
To find an explanation, we have to go place. And he found
back to 'cnaimsech' in the dictionary of that work unfinished
the Royal Irish Academy. It gives a there. And he gat not
reference to a paragraph in Betha Colaim in Erin a smith to
Chille, or Life of Columcille, a book finish it as he would
compiled in 1532 by Manus O'Donnell, fain have had it. And
and edited by A O'Kelleher and G he went to the tomb
Schoepperle, 1918, Chicago: wherein Connla the
Craftsman was laid,
146. On a time and he let open the
that Padraic was in a tomb. And he
place called the assembled the bones
Height in the of Connla together
Ciannachta of and blessed and
Glenngemin, he hallowed them.
blessed a certain spot And he said, 'In
that is called Dun the name of Jesu
Cruin. And there he Christ, arise from the
builded an oratory. dead, Connla the
And he caused Smith.'
Connla the Craftsman And at the word
to make a precious of Columcille
casket for him, where straightway he rose
he might hold in up in the presence of
safeguard the gospels all, as he might rise
and many relics of the from sleep. And he
saints. And ere he had lived twenty years
made an end of that after that, and he
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...
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.
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 pre-
Christian 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
2
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
2
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.
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 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
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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
2
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.
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.
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
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.
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'.
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 pre-
Shakespearean England. Those in
London would have been well known
throughout the British Isles. Many
2
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Cnáimhsighe no more meant bones than
Bonner did, but it recalled the back-
from-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
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.
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?
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
2
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.
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.
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'.

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.
As political humour, O'Donnell's 'in-
bones' 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.
1
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.
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.
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
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.
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, open-
minded 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 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
2
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.
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.
To preserve the 'period' feel of the work,
O'Kelleher and Schoepperle left much of
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.
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.
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.
1
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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'.
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
1
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
According to the Knock Baptismal
Book, my grandfather's eldest sister was
christened Mary Navisey in 1870. The
2
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.
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
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?
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.
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
2
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
2
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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
2
that the children of a woman called
Heather took her name.
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 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 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%
2
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.
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.
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
Addendum, April 1994
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.
1
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.
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
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.
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-than-
Thou, Boner descended from a fantasy.
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
2
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.
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.
Clann Cnáimhsighe : Notable Dates and Events - Whether Fact, Fable or Fun

AD

491 Death of St. Patrick after 30 year mission in Ireland

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

Connla 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 Census lists, Donegal. MacLysaght says the name was rendered as O
Knawsie.
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 Welsh botanist, Lhuyd, finds bearberry in the Burren. He uses Latin for
his records.

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

1857 Griffith Valuation

1890 Birth statistics noted by MacLysaght: 38 Bonner; 9 Crampsie, fewer than

five
Kneafsey. Source is 'A Special Report on the Surnames of Ireland,
Registrar
General, 1894.
Bibliography

'More Irish Surnames' Edward

MacLysaght
'The Surnames of Ireland ' 1982

'A Dictionary of Surnames' P Hanks and F

Hodges
Oxford University Press 1988

'Clann Cnáimhsighe - A Donegal Sept' Brian Bonner

Donegal Annual, 1979

'Gaelic Etymological Dictionary' McBain

1896

'Modern Irish' Micheal Ó Siadhal

1989

'Manus "The Magnificent": O'Donnell as Renaissance Prince' Brendan

Bradshaw
Studies in Irish History 1979
Cosgrove & McCartney,
2
Dublin

'Wild Flowers' Gilmour and

Walters 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' British

Medical
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' McEvedy and

Jones 1978

2
 DISTRIBUTION OF Boner 40
HOUSEHOLDS WITH Bonnar 12
TELEPHONES, Bonner 154
IRELAND, 1990/91

Total
Name Donegal with
phones 239

Kneafsey 0
Neafsey 0 Percent 54
Neacy 0
Neasy 0 Approx
total
with and
Crampsey 2 without
Crampsie 2 phones 443
Cramsie 0

Bonar 29