Áed Dub mac Colmáin

Áed Dub mac Colmáin, whose epithet Dub means the Black or the Dark, was a seventh-century Irish churchman of the Uí Dúnlainge, the Leinster dynasty that in his century established a lasting dominance over the provincial kingship. He was a son of Colmán mac Coirpre (Colmán Már) and a brother of Fáelán mac Colmáin, who later ruled as king of Leinster and died in 666. The kindred descended from Dúnlaing mac Énda Niada and held lands in the Liffey plain, in close proximity to the church of Kildare. Áed’s public life is known almost entirely through that church: the Irish annals remember him not as a secular ruler in the first instance but as head of Cell Dara (Kildare).

The Annals of Ulster record under the year 639 the death of Aed Dubh, abbot of Cill Dara. Corresponding notices appear in other collections of Irish annals, so that 639 is the one firmly attested date in his biography. In the early medieval Irish church a major monastery such as Kildare was ruled by an abbot, while episcopal orders might be held by the same man or by a colleague; later martyrologies and bishop-lists remember Áed as a bishop of Kildare. Kildare itself was a double monastery in the tradition of Saint Brigid, combining a community of nuns, whose abbess was Brigid’s successor, with a community of monks and a growing episcopal and pastoral organisation. By the mid-seventh century, as the slightly later writer Cogitosus attests, Kildare claimed a wide pre-eminence in Leinster, and Áed belonged to the generation that immediately preceded that literary portrait of the church.

Medieval genealogies and some king-lists of Leinster associate Áed Dub with the provincial kingship as well as with Kildare. Modern historians have treated that double identification cautiously. It is possible that a Uí Dúnlainge prince held both royal and ecclesiastical standing, or that later compilers conflated a king and a bishop of the same name and generation. What is not in doubt is the political setting: Áed’s brother Fáelán and Fáelán’s descendants made the Uí Dúnlainge the leading royal dynasty of Leinster, and they were closely linked as patrons to Brigid’s church. Áed’s abbacy therefore sits at the point where dynastic power in the Liffey valley and the fortunes of Kildare reinforced one another.

Beyond the annalistic death-notice, the genealogies, and brief martyrological mention as a bishop of Kildare, almost nothing of Áed’s acts, writings, or personal life has been preserved. No contemporary vita survives, and he should not be confused with other early Irish figures named Áed Dub, such as Áed Dub mac Suibni of Dál nAraidi. He was never Bishop of Rome nor a patriarch of any Eastern see. Details of a formal canonisation, a universally agreed feast day, a recorded place of burial, and any marriage or children are not established in the surviving historical sources. His significance for the historian is that of a royal ecclesiastic of the first half of the seventh century, through whom the Uí Dúnlainge and the church of Kildare can be seen already intertwined a generation before Kildare’s status was celebrated by Cogitosus.