Two accounts compete for the form's origin: an Irish oral tradition traced to the eighteenth-century Fili na Maighe verse-jousters of Croom, County Limerick, and a purely English print history beginning with the 1822 anthology Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen, which used the form seventy-four years before the word 'limerick' itself is first recorded, in 1896. Neither the Irish oral claim nor the English print claim has documentary evidence connecting it directly to the other.
What would resolve this A documented link connecting the Croom verse-jousting tradition to the earliest printed English limericks would settle the question; short of that, the two histories remain genuinely independent claims.
OpenFolklore and the history of English light verseEncyclopaedia Britannica