They deal minutely not only with the management of land and animal rearing but with innumerable further details of husbandry, including milling, dyeing, dairying, malting, meat curing, and spinning and weaving..  Wool was spun with a wooden spindle weighted with a whorl of bone or stone and woven on a loom.  The outer garment worn both men and womenwas a large woolen cloak (brat), fatened onshoulder or breast with a pin or brooch.  The inner garment was a long linen tunic (leine) held together at the waist with a belt. Shoes of rawhide or tanned leather were worn, at least by the upper classes and the higher professional ranks.

 A large amount of metalwork reveals the adaptation by Irish craftsmen of many techniques originating in Britain or on the continent.  An instinct for design, added to the skillful use of these techniques enabled them to produce many superb objects of which the Tara Brooch dating from the mid-8th century is an outstanding example.

The chief musical instrument of the period was the harp.

THE BOOK OF MAGAURAN

The Book of Magauran is termed to be a particularly remarkable example of a Duanire, an official book which each of the more important reigning families in Ireland possessed and in which were enshrined in the bardic eulogies of the family.

In one of the poems published in the Book of Magauran, Tomas Magauran or McGovern was said to be able to muster 700 armed horsemen. (One of the rules those days was that if you considered yourself a bonafide chief or king you had to be able to command, one or another 700 horses and warriors, and these often included paid soldiers--mercenaries.)

The Magauran Duanaire is a vellum  (a fine-grained calfskin) manuscript, dated about the 14th century and contains fifty-four pages, chiefly bardic poetry, and a full account of the family and its possessions, manners and customs of Teallach Eochaidh, or Tullyhaw.

The scribe who copied it was one Rory O'Keenan who compiled it for Thomas Magauran who was then chieftain.  This Thomas Magauran died in 1343, which establishes the later limit of the manuscript.

The death of Rory O’Keenan is entered as 1387 in the Irish Annals. The Four Masters refers to him as a learned historian and bard of the Oirghialla. (Though Lambert McKenna who
translated the book into English didn't think highly of him.)  The evidence suggests that the
Duanaire was compiled between the years 1339, and 1343.

The principal residence of the Magaurans was at Lissanover in the parish of Templeport.  Evidently the bardic tradition there was well established and it is most probable that a Bardic School presided over by O'Keenan was then in existence.  The Duanaire nay be accepted as positive evidence of the high literary standards

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