the Ogham alphabet. The earliest of such inscriptions probably date from the 3rd or 4th century. Ogham inscriptions are found primarily in the south of Ireland as well as in Wales, Devon and Cornwall, where it was brought by settlers from Ireland to sub-Roman Britain, and in the Isle of Man. Old Irish Old Irish first appears in the margins of Latin manuscripts as early as the 6th century. A large number of early Irish literary texts, though recorded in manuscripts of the Middle Irish period (such as Lebor na hUidre and the Book of Leinster), are essentially Old Irish in character. Middle Irish Middle Irish is the form of Irish used from the 10th to 12th centuries; it is therefore a contemporary of late Old English and early Middle English. It is the language of a large amount of literature, including the entire Ulster Cycle. Early Modern Irish Early Modern Irish represents a transition between Middle Irish and Modern Irish. Its literary form, Classical Gaelic, was used in Ireland and Scotland from the 13th to the 18th century. The grammar of Early Modern Irish is laid out in a series of grammatical tracts written by native speakers and intended to teach the most cultivated form of the language to student bards, lawyers, doctors, administrators, monks, and so on in Ireland and Scotland. Nineteenth and twentieth centuries It is believed that Irish remained the majority tongue as late as 1800 but became a minority language during the 19th century. It is an important part of Irish nationalist identity, marking a cultural distance between Irish people and the English. A combination of the introduction of state funded, though predominantly denominationally Church delivered, primary education (the 'National Schools'), from 1831, in which Irish was omitted from the curriculum till 1878, and only then added as a curiosity, to be learnt after English, Latin, Greek and French, and in the absence of an authorised Irish Catholic bible (An Biobla Naofa) before 1981, resulting in instruction primarily in English, or Latin. The National Schools run by the Roman Catholic Church discouraged its use until about 1890. The Great Famine () hit a disproportionately high number of Irish speakers (who lived in the poorer areas heavily hit by famine deaths and emigration), translated into its rapid decline. Irish political leaders, such as Daniel O'Connell (, himself a native speaker), were also critical of the language,