John Clyn was an Anglo-Irish Franciscan friar and the source of Annals of Ireland by Friar John Clyn, written in Kilkenny and cover the stop from the "origin of the public" to 1349. According to the seventeenth-century antiquarian James Ussher, Clyn was natural in Leinster and held the level of doctor. The surname Clyn is not usual in Ireland, but there is a townland a few miles from Kilkenny called Clinstown.
From the annals, we take that Clyn became the first protector of the friary of Carrickbeg (Carrick-on-Suir) in 1336, when the earl of Ormond presented the property to the Franciscans. Clyn was introduce in Kilkenny friary in 1348 during the Black Death, when he identified himself as the source of the annals. The annals are notable for a dramatic firsthand account of the Black Death in Ireland in 1349. A really rough seventeenth-century transcript claims that Clyn was also guardian of the Franciscan friary of Kilkenny. Clyn`s original manuscript is no longer extant; Sir Richard Shee, sovereign (mayor) of Kilkenny, possessed the manuscript in 1543, and by 1631 it had been acquired by David Rothe, bishop of Ossory. Four main seventeenth-century transcripts survive, and they say that the annals were copied from the community book of the Franciscans of Kilkenny. There is scant reference to Franciscan affairs, but as the annals reportedly were split of the community book of the Franciscans of Kilkenny, there would have been no motive for such data in the annals. The annals consist of very brief entries, with years often repeated and out of sequence, until 1333. All four transcripts agree that in 1333 a new division of the annals commenced. Clyn`s main concern is in the military society of the region surrounding Kilkenny in a turbulent period of Anglo-Irish history. Internal evidence suggests that Clyn was intimate with military order and displayed a keen interest in knighthood, noting who was knighted by whom. Clyn respected a certain code of conduct, which led him to show displeasure at actions, perpetrated by either the native Irish or the Anglo-Irish, that were adverse to the highest standards of knighthood. Clyn has sometimes been considered as uncongenial to the Irish, and so during this tumultuous period it was alone to be expected that they should receive censure, but Clyn is noteworthy for his critique of the troublesome members of the Anglo-Irish nation also. Clyn is particularly shocked by treachery or betrayal, in any shape and by either nation. On balance, Clyn only refers to the Irish state in congress to its force on the Anglo-Irish nation. Clyn exhibited a special familiarity with the local Mac Gillapatrick family. Among the Anglo-Irish, it is the de la Frene family that occasions most interest. The dominant personality in Clyn`s annals is Fulk de la Frene, whose knighting by the earl of Ormond Clyn reports in 1335. Fulk emerges, in Clyn`s annals, as a stiff military man, and this is reflected by the reports of his victories over the Irish and his success in expelling Anglo-Irish troublemakers. The longest entry in the annals is for 1348, which describes the horrors of the Black Death, an issue that the author regarded as truly catastrophic and apocalyptic. Clyn`s account of the plague opens with pilgrimages to the local St. Mullins Well; these were, he tells us, inspired by dread of the plague. His entry includes the number of people who died in Dublin from August to Christmas, the list who had died in the Franciscan friaries of Drogheda and Dublin from the first of the hassle to Christmas, and the information that the pestilence was at its elevation in Kilkenny during Lent. Although Clyn enters the amount of Dominicans who died in Kilkenny, he makes no note of Franciscan deaths, but this information could have been entered in another part of the community book. Clyn also includes an explanation of the pest in Avignon and a lengthy history of an apocalyptic vision given to a monk at the Cistercian monastery at Tripoli in 1347. It is with great sorrow, and a great eulogy, that Clyn reports, in his last entry, the end of Fulk in 1349. The seventeenth-century transcripts suggest that Clyn died of the plague. Another theory is that Clyn was touched to a different friary as percentage of a possible redistribution necessary after the decimation of some friaries. A third theory is only that Clyn ceased to publish once his friend, and perhaps patron, Fulk de la Frene, had died.
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