Falktner — The Hospital of St. John of Jeni>>at(>m. 301 



to have passed with the second monarch of the House of Lancaster. The 

 Order had by this time long outlived the circumstances of its origin. 

 The Crusades were already a tradition, and the knights wlio had been 

 dubbed as soldiers of the Cross had become at best the militia of the 

 English king. The era of the French wars had provided them, indeed, 

 with a field which, however mundane, was not inappropriate to the 

 display of their more chivalrous qualities. But the smaller stage pro- 

 vided by the Wars of the Eoses gave scope only for their less excellent 

 aptitudes, and the brotherhood quickly degenerated from a spirited 

 soldiery to what was little better than a noxious banditti. A change 

 appears to have taken place, too, in the characteristic qualities previously 

 required of the Priors, if not of the knights generally. They were no 

 longer selected from the English houses of the Order, but were chosen 

 from within the ranks of the Irish brethren. They thus came to have 

 local and personal interests as distinguished from those of their Order, 

 and to subordinate their official functions to their personal concerns. 

 The knightly Prior Butler had for his immediate successors a 

 trio of turbulent Superiors, who took full advantage of the civil 

 disorders of the realm to lord it over their neighbours, and who were so 

 far from paying regard to their religious vows that they did not scruple 

 to squander the revenues of the Hospital on the aggrandisement of their 

 personal fortunes, and to misappropriate its treasures. It is evident 

 from the proceedings of Priors FitzGerald, Talbot, and Keating 

 that in the latter half of the fifteenth century the Priory of Kilmainham 

 had lost much of its ancient consideration, and that it had degenerated, 

 through the rapacity of its temporary chiefs, into a selfish corporation, 

 powerful only for mischief, and scarcely giving even a nominal homage 

 to the great and sacred purposes for which the Knights of St. John 

 had originally been constituted. Two further Statutes of the Irish 

 Parliament in the reign of Henry VII indicate plainly the extent 

 and gravity of the disorders which arose. The first of these, passed 

 in 1494, " at the supplication of Sir John Kendall, Prior of St. John's, 

 Jerusalem, Within his realm of England, in the name of the Lord 

 Great Master of the Eodys," sets forth that although the Order in 

 Ireland was ^'founded and endowed honourably with many and divers 

 great lordships and possessions," yet "forasmuch as by the course of 

 the great debates and dissentions which have been betwixt lords 

 spiritual and temporal and others of the said land," the rents and 

 revenues thereof had greatly decayed. A second Statute passed in 

 the same year is more precise in defining the causes of tliis impover- 

 ishment of the Order. It recites that " Sir James Ketyug, pretended 



