414 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
dows, there is an angel holding a shield of this kind. The meaning of 
it has not been explained satisfactorily. Its date is ascertained to be 
1494. 
It remains for me to say a few words on the relic of the Holy Cross 
from which the Abbey has taken its name. I have already given 
Hartry’s account of its coming to this country. Can that account refer 
in any way to the piece of the true Cross which Robert of Gloucester 
says was sent to Queen Matilda, the wife of Stephen, by her uncle 
Godfrey of Boulogne, king of Jerusalem, and a portion of which she 
presented to her favourite Abbey of Fevesham? O’Halloran, who 
gives no authority for his statement, says Mortogh O’Brien received 
from Pope Pascal in 1110 a gift of a piece of the Cross covered with 
gold and ornamented with precious stones, and determined to found a 
Monastery for its reception. This he did not live to finish, but Donogh 
O’Brien, king of Thomond, completed it in 1169. Be that as it may, 
this Abbey was a favourite place of pilgrimage with the Irish in con- 
sequence of their belief that a portion of the True Cross was kept 
there. ‘‘The Suir,’”’ says Camden, ‘‘ passes by Holy Cross, a famous 
Abbey heretofore, which makes the county about it to be commonly 
called the County of the Holy Cross of Tipperary, and hath derived to 
this tract certain privileges anciently bestowed on this Abbey in honour 
to a piece of Christ’s Cross preserved there. . . . And it is incredible 
what a concourse of people still throng hither out of devotion.” And 
Sir Henry Sidney, writing to Queen Elizabeth in 1567, speaks of ‘‘the 
Hollie Crosse, where there is no small confluence of the people still 
resorting.’ Carve, himself a Tipperary man, says in his Lyra that 
‘this Monastery was the most famous of all Ireland, and that vast 
crowds used to come there as to a holy mountain.” In 1600, when 
Tyrone with his army was going to the south ‘‘to confirm his friend- 
ship with his allies, and to wreak his vengeance on his enemies, he 
turned off his road to Roscrea and Templemore till he arrived at the 
gate of Holy Cross. They had not been long there when the Holy 
Cross was brought out to shelter and protect them, and the Irish pre- 
sented great gifts and many offerings to its keepers and to the monks 
in honour of the God of the elements, and they gave protection to the 
Monastery and steward in respect to its houses and glebe lands and to 
all its inhabitants.” 
The cross was commonly kept over the high altar. At times it 
was taken down to be touched to sick persons who sought a cure. 
Often, too, it was carried about in procession. A coloured drawing of 
the procession is given at page 33 of the manuscript. The monks had 
it in their possession long after the dissolution of the Monastery. 
Hartry says they kept it in a rented house in Kilkenny, where they 
had established themselves until better times would come round and 
enable them to return to their Monastery. About 1632 it seems to have 
come into the hands of the Ormonde family. Walter, the eleventh 
Earl of Ormonde, styled on account of his devotions, as Dr. French 
tells us, ‘ Walter of the Rosaries,’ handed it over to Dr. Fennell in 
