Produced by Bryan Ness, Carla Foust, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) Transcriber's note Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Printer errors have been changed and are listed at the end. Characters that could not be displayed directly in Latin-1 are transcribed as follows: _ - Italics ^o - masculine ordinal [.b] - lentition on top of b [mc] - maltese cross [V] - versicle [R] - response THE IRISH ECCLESIASTICAL RECORD. DECEMBER, 1864. THE DIOCESE OF ROSS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. The _Lives of the Irish Bishops_, published by Ware, in 1665, and rewritten by Harris in the beginning of the last century, have been long regarded as authentic history; and the statements of these learned writers have been generally accepted without hesitation, being supposed to rest on ancient and indubious documents. It is thus, to take a quite recent example, that the Rev. W. Maziere Brady, D.D., in the third volume of his _Records of Cork, Cloyne, and Ross_ (London, 1864), adopts, with only a few verbal variations, the whole narrative of Ware regarding St. Fachnan and his successors in the see of Ross. Nevertheless, many of his statements are inaccurate, and some of them, too, are wholly at variance with historic truth. At the very threshold of our present inquiry we meet with one instance which alone should suffice to render us cautious in accepting the assertions of such historians, when unconfirmed by other authorities. "One _Thady_" (Ware thus writes), "was Bishop of Ross on the 29th of January, 1488, and died a little after; but I have not found where he was consecrated. One _Odo_ succeeded in 1489, and sat only five years. He died in 1494" (Ware, pag. 587. Brady, _Records_, etc., vol. iii., pag. 139).