Mureuy—An Ancient MS. History of Holy Cross Abbey. 411 
son of Turlogh O’Brien, king of Munster, a beaming lamp in peace and 
war, and a brilliant star of hospitality of the Munstermen and all Leth- 
mogha, died.” 
This was a,time, too, when religious life sprung up afresh throughout 
all Europe, and especially in Ireland, after a long and dreary gloom. 
For more than two centuries, from 794, when the fierce sea-rovers from 
the north first set foot on our shores and plundered the shrines of 
Rathlin, to their defeat in 1014, our history is little more than a 
monotonous record of plunderings and burnings of churches and monas- 
teries and of the slaughter of their inmates by these marauders. The 
Four Masters tell us ‘‘they were escorted with fire.” And it was 
not merely the places along the coast that were devastated: Kildare 
and Armagh, Roscrea and Clonmacnoise, were ravaged almost as often 
as Aran of the Saints and Ross of the Pilgrims. No wonder that St. 
Bernard should say of Ireland in his time, that it heard the name of 
monk as something belonging to remote times, but it never saw one. 
Yet, for the three centuries that preceded these evil times, youths 
flocked to its monastic schools from the most distant lands, and its 
monks went forth as missionaries in vast numbers to found churches 
in almost every country of Europe. St. Bernard was one of those men 
who make an epoch. It has been said of him, that ‘‘no man during a 
lifetime ever exercised a personal influence like his. He was the stayer 
of popular commotions, the queller of heresies, the umpire between 
princes and kings, the counsellor of popes, the founder of a great, 
religious order, the preacher of a crusade.” His fame penetrated even 
to the far West, and Malachy of Armagh thought he could not consult 
better for the interests of his flock than by bringing among them some 
of the monks of Citeaux, to leaven them by their teaching, and still 
more by the silent example of their virtues; and so they came and 
settled down in a quiet valley, as was their wont, for 
Bernardus valles, colles Benedictus amabat, 
Oppida Franciscus, magnas Ignatius urbes. 
Mellifont, the Fountain of Honey, was the first Monastery of the Order 
in Ireland, and within little more than two score years its abbeys and 
minor foundations numbered forty, none of them, indeed, equal in extent 
and beauty to Savigny, or Fountains, or Melrose, but perhaps by their 
very simplicity embodying better than these the primitive spirit of the 
founder of the Cistercian Order. 
Donnell O’Brien’s grant was confirmed by Henry II., John, and 
Richard. King John’s charter runs thus: ‘‘ Know you, that for the 
love of God and the salvation of my own soul and the souls of my 
predecessors and successors, I have granted and given, and by these 
presents do grant and give, to God and the B. V. Mary of the Holy 
Cross, and to the Cistercian Monks serving God there, in free, pure, and 
perpetual alms, the undersigned lands as fully and freely as Donnell 
O’Brien, king of Limerick, gave and granted, and by his Charter con- 
firmed them to the Cistercian Monks of Holy Cross. . . . These lands 
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