(1) We have thirty canons preserved in a MS. which once belonged to the cathedral library of Worcester, and is now MS. 279 in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It was written on the continent in the ninth or tenth century, and an account of it and its contents will be found in _The Early Collection of Canons known as the Hibernensis, two Unfinished Papers, by Henry Bradshaw_, 1893. These canons are usually described as the acts of a synod—Synodus I. Patricii—and were printed inaccurately in the collections of Spelman (i. 52 _sqq._) and Wilkins (i. 2-3). An accurate text is given in Haddan and Stubbs, _Councils_, ii. 328-30. The document begins thus: Gratias agimus Deo patri et filio et spiritui sancto. Presbiteris et diaconibus et omni clero Patricius Auxilius Isserninus episcopi salutem. Satius nobis negligentes praemonere [quam] culpare que facta sunt, Solamone dicente, Melius est arguere quam irasci. Exempla difinitionis nostrae inferius conscripta sunt et sic inchoant. The canons follow. Thus the document professes to be a circular letter addressed by Patricius, Auxilius, and Iserninus to the clergy, and embodying ecclesiastical rules and penalties on which the three bishops agreed. It seems misleading to describe these rules as the canons of a synod; they are canons laid down by a conclave of three bishops whose authority was acknowledged, and a conclave of three bishops is not a synod in the usual sense of the term. It may be observed, before going farther, that the preface, instead of arousing suspicion, prepossesses us in favour of the genuineness of the document. Conferences and co-operation between Patrick and the southern bishops Auxilius and Iserninus are, as I hinted above, just what we should expect; and a forger who, say in the eighth century, desired to foist upon Patrick canons of later origin would have been much less likely to associate Patrick with these two bishops than with others, such as Benignus, who appeared more conspicuously in the story of his life. We may fairly argue that, if the canons themselves should turn out to be spurious, at all events the forger must have founded his superscription on the fact that genuine canons had been issued by the three bishops. Consequently, the superscription seems to me, in any case, to be evidence for the co-operation of Patricius, Auxilius, and Iserninus in organising the Church in Ireland.