of Irish history, of that blending of sanctity and heroism, of princely piety and monastic learning, of fervid religious zeal and devoted patriotism that, like the sunshine and showers on an Irish landscape, compose the lights and shadows of Irish annals, Boyle is an epitome and memorial elsewhere unsurpassed in Ireland.

As early as the seventh century, Aldfrid, (1) a Saxon prince who was raised to the throne of Northumbria in 685, while a student at Mayo of the Saxons, the famous school founded by Saint Colman after his flight from Lindisfarne, made an itinerary of Ireland, which itinerary he recorded in the Irish tongue in a poem of which James Clarence Mangan has given us a translation:

"I found in Innisfail the fair,

In Ireland while in exile there,

Women of worth, both grave and gay men,
Many clerics and many laymen.

That phrase of King Aldfrid's, "the noble district of Boyle," sums up the history of the town. For noble the district of Boyle

pre-eminently is-noble in the fertility of its soil, noble in its charm of location and beauty of environment, noble in the venerable traditions of holiness and learning that sanctify the place, noble in the heroism, the munificence and the chivalry of its ancient princes.

No lovelier theatre could be conceived for lovely or heroic drama than the environments of Boyle. Nature has been singularly kind to the quaint little town, investing it with a charm of scenery that well befits its romantic story. In the extreme north of Roscommon it stands on the Boyle river, on the isthmus formed by Lough Gara on the southwest and Lough Key on the northeast. The river rises in Lough Gara and, after a turbulent course through dark hills and valleys, now rich in verdure, now clothed with purple heather, anon gray with the desolation of accumulated boulders, reminding one of some prehistoric battlefield of giants or titans, falls after a succession of gentle rapids and foaming cascades into the blue expanse of

(1) "Among the Anglo-Saxon students resorting to Ireland was Prince Aldfrid, afterwards King of the Northumbrian Saxons." Bede.

Lough Key. It flows through the quiet little town and is spanned near the abbey by a picturesque and moss-grown bridge coeval with the abbey. The abbey is on the outskirts of the town, near the exit of the stream, in the heart of a park-like landscape, whose wooded beauty now rises to some gently swelling knoll, now opens up green vistas of meadow and pasture. North of the town run the Curlew mountains, a range of purple hills, famous in Irish history as the scene of many stubborn conflicts and penetrated from Boyle by the pass of Ballagh Boy, or the Yellow Road, a desolate gorge running through wood and bog where the armies of Queen Elizabeth were defeated in 1599 by Red Hugh O'Donnell. Around the town are the rich plains of Boyle celebrated in song and story, and forming part of the vast plain of Magh Ai, immortalized by Aubrey de Vere in his epic: "The Foray of Queen Maeve." The whole neighborhood is rife with romantic tradition, its chief interest centering in the MacDermot princes who formerly ruled over the ancient district of Moylurg, as the north of Roscommon was called; who built, embellished and protected the Abbey of the Blessed Virgin Mary and who had their home on the Rock, an island in Lough Key where the ruins of their castle still exist.

And be it noted in Aldfrid's eulogium that as early as the seventh century, Boyle possessed especially this threefold nobility of learning, sanctity and valor-Brehons, Erenachs, horsemen bold and sudden in fight-which distinguished it down to the so-called Reformation. Indeed its mediæval monastic glories were foreshadowed long before the seventh century. Local traditions and authentic documents teem with the fame of the holy men and women who dwelt in the district of Boyle in that golden age of her history that has won for Ireland the title of "Insula Sanctorum et Doctorum."

The abbey, established originally at Grillechdune in 1148, by a community of monks from Mellifont, was translated to Boyle in 1161, under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin Mary and by the zeal and munificence of MacDermot, Prince of Moylurg. But it was preceded by other monastic institutions, one at Drumconnell to the south and one at Assylin to the north of the town. That at Drumconnell, now called Drum, was the seat of St. Conal, while St. Dachonna presided over the house at Assylin, a beautiful cataract on the Boyle river, formerly called Eas Dachonna (Dachonna's Falls), after its guardian saint. And coupled with these two in local tradition is yet another saint-Attracta or Atty-the fame of

whose sanctity and sweetness is yet fragrant throughout Roscommon, Mayo and Sligo, and whose name is yet perpetuated in many places founded by or associated with her, as in Killaraght (St. Attracta's Church) on the Roscommon shore of Lough Gara, Toberarraght (Attracta's Well) near Ballaghaderreen, in Sligo, Cloghan Arraght in Lough Gara, a remarkable causeway connecting the Sligo with the Roscommon shore of the lake.

This Attracta is said to have been the sister of Conal and, though her fame is now mainly associated with the diocesis of Achonry in Sligo and Mayo, her ascetic life was begun at Boyle in the diocese of Elphin. For it is written of her that, having left her father's princely home to follow a life of penance and perfection she desired to settle at Drum, where Conal had his church; but Conal regarding this intended settlement as an encroachment on his own religious house, got Saint Dachonna of Eas Dachonna, to dissuade Attracta from her project. This Dachonna did, and Attracta moved westward into Sligo, where she set up a great religious house of hospitality at the intersection of the chief highways of Connaught, where food and shelter were dispensed gratuitously to all travellers.

In this, Attracta is said to be the founder of those great houses of public entertainment that flourished in Ireland down to the Reformation. Indeed she seems to have been one of the first in the universal Church to organize an institution for the practice of this great religious and social virtue of hospitality, which the Church. endorsed and recommended in its Frêres Hospitaliers and Sœurs Hospitalieres.

This great Hospital, as the country folks still call it, she set up at Killaraght. It must have been a place of much repute besides saintly beneficence, as it is spoken of to this day throughout the district. It existed down to the Reformation, when it was suppressed, and its possessions granted to Sir John King, whose descendant, Lord Kingston, is entered in the Quit and Crown Rents Book of 1692, as "Tenant of the Hospital, or Religious House called Termon Killaraght." (1)

But before leaving Boyle for Killaraght, Attracta foretold the foundation of Boyle Abbey, for she told Dachonna that before long both his church and that of Conal, to the south, would suffer great

(1) Archdeacon O'Rourke's " History of Sligo Town and County," Vol. II.

loss of revenue from the erection of a new monastery between them. The "new monastery" was the Cistercian Abbey, the fame of which in the middle ages overshadowed that of all its predecessors and local contemporaries.

But it was antedated by a few years by another monastic institution prominently associated with Moylurg and the princely house of MacDermot and figuring eminently in the annals of Ireland. This was the monastery of the Holy Trinity, on Trinity Island, in Lough Key, a little to the east of Boyle and into which the Boyle river flows. For in the Annals of Boyle, composed in and near Boyle by the historians of the MacDermot family, we find this entry under the date of "the Kalends of January, 1251": "Clarus, Archdeacon of Elphin, a man prudent and discreet, who kept his flesh attenuated by prayer and fasting, who defended the poor and orphans, who waited for the crown of patience, who suffered persecution from many for the sake of justice (died); the venerable founder of the places of the Confraternity of the Holy Trinity throughout all Ireland, especially the founder of the Monastery of the Holy Trinity in Lough Cè, where he selected his place of sepulture; there he rested in Christ on Saturday, before Pentecost Sunday, anno Domini, 1251."

And this holy man is further referred to by the Four Masters, under the date of A.D. 1235, as Clarus MacMailin, a member of the learned and saintly O'Mulconry family, who were the hereditary historians of the MacDermot princes and who wrote the Annals of Boyle and the Annals of Lough Key, two important medieval contributions, rich in genealogical, topographical and historical data, to the annals of Ireland. In the ruins on Trinity Island the grave of this distinguished man is yet pointed out by the country people, who refer to it reverently as the "Bishop's grave."

There is yet another island, now known as the "Island of Saints," where, according to Adamnan, St. Columba sojourned for a time, founding there a monastery which was inhabited by Culdees (servants of God), down to the twelfth century. Local tradition has it that Columba also founded a house of prayer at Eas Mac Neirc (the cascade of the sons of Erc) on the mainland, a place which is commonly identified as the site of the great Abbey of the Blessed Virgin Mary. (1)

(1) John O'Donovan, editor of the Four Masters, maintains that Assylin and Eas MacNeirc, were identical.

As is well known, the monastic spirit was pre-eminently the spirit of the Irish church from its earliest days. It saw its full flower in the four centuries between the death of Saint Patrick and the invasion of the Northmen. Then, indeed, it faded amid the desolation of all things that befell Ireland, but it awoke again to, if possible, a richer efflorescence in the brief period from the overthrow of the Danish dominion to the coming of the Anglo-Normans. For, to quote the annals of Clonmacnois, by the Danes, "the whole realm was overrun and overspread. The churches, abbeys and other religious places were by them quite razed and debased, or otherwise turned to vile, base, servile and abominable uses.

But King Bryan (1) was a meet salve to cure such festering sores, all the phissick in the world could not help it elsewhere; in a small time he banished the Danes, made up the churches and religious houses, restored the nobility to their ancient patrimony and possessions, and in fine brought all to a notable reformation."

The revival begun under King Brian continued without intermission down to the Reformation and was of so fervent and magnificent a nature that at the suppression of the religious houses by Henry VIII, there were in Ireland some 537 monasteries and abbeys. The Canons Regular of St. Augustine counted 231 houses, the Augustinian Canonesses 36 houses, the Order of Premontré under St. Norbert counted 9, the Knights of Jerusalem, several of them occupying the lands of the Templars, counted 22; the Benedictine monks counted 9, the Benedictine nuns 5 houses, the Cistercian Order under St. Bernard counted 42, the Cistercian nuns counted 2, the Dominicans counted 43, the Franciscans 70, the Capuchins counted 2, Eremites of St. Augustine counted 27, the Order of Mary of Mount Carmel counted 25, and the Trinitarians for the redemption of captives, numbered 52. (2)

The Abbey of the Blessed Virgin on the Boyle river was, like most other Cistercian houses in Ireland before the Norman invasion, an offshoot of the great monastery founded at Mellifont in Louth in 1143, by a colony of monks who, at the request of St. Malachi, the great Archbishop of Armagh, had come direct from the mother house of Clairvaux. But, in dealing with Boyle Abbey, it is

(1) Brian Boru, who on good Friday, 1014, broke the power of the Danes at Clontarf.

(2) Church History of Ireland. Vol. ii., Sylvester Malone, M.R.I. A.