The manuscript's documented history begins with a crime. Under the year 1007 the Annals of Ulster record that the great gospel book of Colum Cille was taken by night from the western sacristy of the stone church at Kells, and the entry calls it the chief relic of the western world. It was found two months and twenty nights later, hidden under sods, and its cover of gold had been torn away. The cover was never recovered.
That single entry carries several things at once. It fixes the book at Kells by 1007. It shows what the thief valued, which was the metalwork rather than the gospels. And it explains an absence: the object as its makers finished it had a treasure binding, and what survives is the part they would have thought of as the inside.
The book stayed at Kells for another six centuries. In 1654 it was sent to Dublin for safekeeping while Cromwellian troops were quartered in the church, and it was given to Trinity College by Henry Jones, later Bishop of Meath, in the early 1660s. It has never left Ireland since.
The last irreversible damage was not done by a thief. A binder in 1821 trimmed the margins to square the leaves and cut into the decoration on several pages, removing parts of the ornament permanently. The 1953 rebinding into four volumes was done to allow display without further harm.