440 Mr. PETEIE'S Inquiry into the Origin and 



" The soul was borne in the twinkling of an eye through the golden erdam, and the glass veil, 

 to the country of the saints." 



In this description the idea of an arched or open porch is also distinctly 

 indicated ; and, if we chose to understand it in the sense of an entrance porch, as 

 found in the Norman and later churches in England, such a supposition would 

 receive support from a passage which occurs in a very ancient satirical extra- 

 vaganza preserved in the same MS., and which was written to ridicule the 

 luxury and inhospitality of a certain abbot of Cork, named Manchine, who 

 flourished in the eighth century. 



" 6a h-ampa cpa in oipepe i m-babup arm. * * Comla jepeb ppipp, 7 ^epp-cenb mapoci 

 puppi. Gcomcuipechep puapbomarmo echap, op Hlac Conjlmm, co bopup epoaim, im bopup 

 in Dunam oia n-echcaip." Leabhar Breac. Fol. 109, b., now fol. 100, b. 



" Admirable was the hermitage that was there. * * * It had a gate of suet to it, with the short 

 head of a maroc upon it. I went up out of my boat, says Mac Conglinni, to the door of the erdam, 

 at the door of the dun on the outside." 



But though this passage so distinctly shows an acquaintance with the use of 

 an entrance porch, we have, as already observed, no existing example of such 

 in any ancient Irish church ; nor were it otherwise, would it prove that the 

 word erdam was applied exclusively to a porch of this kind; because, without 

 dwelling upon the fact that the church of Kells must have had more than one 

 erdam, we can hardly believe that the Book of Kells, the most valuable treasure 

 of that monastery, would have been kept in any porch open externally. In 

 our present state of knowledge on the subject, therefore, the safest conjecture 

 to be hazarded would seem to be that the word erdam, like the word porticus, 

 in the middle ages, was variously applied to any extraneous or side-building, of 

 any kind, attached to a greater ; and, that the erdams noticed in the Irish annals 

 were most probably sacristies, orother lateral apartments, entered from the interior 

 of the church. Of such structures there are several examples remaining, as at 

 Glendalough, Inis Cathy, the church on the island at Killaloe ; and in the cathe- 

 dral of Killaloe there is a remarkable instance of a porch of this kind, entered 

 from the interior of the church, through a magnificently sculptured archway, 

 within which, according to the tradition of the country, Turlough O'Brien, 

 King of Thomond, was interred, a circumstance quite in unison with the use 

 of such porticoes, as noticed by Bede. 



