The story of the conversion of the two magicians, as told by Tírechán, was evidently designed to illustrate this proverb, but without any comprehension of the proverb’s real significance. In other words, it was invented, or reshaped, at a time when the native tonsure had so completely ousted its rival that men almost forgot that there had been a rival. The story indeed bears upon it an obvious mark of manufacture, in that it represents one of the Druids as named Caplait. He could not have borne this name till after his conversion. That the story was entirely invented for the purpose of explaining the proverb is extremely unlikely. I suggest as probable that in the original story there was only one Druid, who on his conversion received the Christian tonsure, and thus from being _Mael_ became _Caplait_. The proverb suggested the duplication of Mael-Caplait into two brethren. * * * * * It is another question—and for the present purpose does not matter—whether the Christian tonsure of the fifth century was the tonsure of the seventh century, the _corona_, or not. It may have been a total shaving of the head, no fringe being left. The earliest mention of the _corona_ seems to occur in Gregory of Tours, _Liber Vitae Patrum_, xvii. 1 (p. 728, ed. M.G.H.), and it may not have become general before the sixth century. We have no particulars as to the exact nature of the tonsure referred to in Socrates, _H.E._, 3. 1. 9, or in Salvian, _De gub. Dei_, 8. 21. Once the coronal tonsure was introduced in the west,[265] the total tonsure was distinguished as the Greek or St. Paul’s tonsure (see Bede, _H.E._, iv. 1); but it seems not improbable that the total tonsure was universal in the early part, at all events, of the fifth century. There is a passage in Tírechán which seems to me to preserve the memory of the practice of total tonsure in the days of St. Patrick. It is the name of Patrick’s charioteer, fol. 13 vᵒ b (322)₂₆: Et sepiliuit illum aurigam totum id totmael caluum. The hybrid name _Tot-mael_ contrasts the Christian tonsure with the native semi-tonsure, but it suggests total rather than coronal tonsure. It is, in any case, another undesigned testimony to the difference between the ecclesiastical and the native tonsures in Patrick’s time; while it possibly indicates that the _mos Romanus_ introduced into Ireland in the fifth century may have been partially different from the _mos Romanus_ which was reintroduced in the seventh. But the passage in Tírechán on which I have commented appears to me to demonstrate that the foreign tonsure had at one time been customary for clerics in Ireland; and therefore the objection to the genuineness of the circular letter, which has been founded on the inclusion of a canon on this subject, falls to the ground.