(monastic federations) of the Irish church received royal patronage in the form of shrines, building works, land, and protection. The concept of a high king was occasionally recorded in various annals, such as an entry regarding the death of Máel Sechnaill mac Máele Ruanaid in 862 in the Annals of Ulster, which lists him as rí Érenn uile (king of all Ireland), a title which his successor Aed Finliath apparently never was granted. It is unclear what political reality was behind this title. Later High Kings By the twelfth century, the dual process of agglomeration of territory and consolidation of kingship saw the handful of remaining provincial kings abandoning the traditional royal sites for the cities, employing ministers and governors, receiving advice from an oireacht (a body of noble counsellors), presiding at reforming synods, and maintaining standing armies. Early royal succession had been by alternation between collateral branches of the wider dynasty, but succession was now confined to a series of father/son, brother/brother and uncle/nephew successions within a small royal fine marked by an exclusive surname. These compact families (the Uí Briain of Munster, the Meic Lochlainn of the North, the Uí Conchubhair of Connacht) intermarried and competed against each other on a national basis so that on the eve of the Anglo-Norman incursion of 1169 the agglomeration/consolidation process was complete and their provincial kingdoms divided, dismembered and transformed into fiefdoms held from (or in rebellion against) one of their number acting as king of Ireland. See also History of Ireland List of High Kings of Ireland List of Irish kingdoms Lists of Irish kings Notes References Lebor Gabála Érenn Geoghegan Clan John Francis Byrne, 1973, Irish Kings and High Kings, Dublin Annals of the Four Masters Geoffrey Keating, 1636, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn High King Niall: the most fertile man in Ireland, The Times Online, The Times, 15 January 2006 Laoise T. Moore et al., A Y-Chromosome Signature of Hegemony in Gaelic Ireland Am. J. Hum. Genet., 78:334–338, 2006 External links Nationality and Kingship in Pre-Norman Ireland by Prof. Donnchadh Ó Corráin, University College Cork Medieval Ireland Cycles of the Kings Irish mythology