l, as surviving representatives of that convent.

Few traces of either church or convent now remain. The causeway leading
from the church to the abbey may still be recognized; and a crumbling
portion of ivy-clad wall, within the Protestant glebe, on the other side
of the river, shows where the coenobium stood. The lands attached to the
convent were granted away for ever to Richard Nugent by 4th and 5th
Philip and Mary. By 20th Elizabeth, this Friary, containing half an
acre, house, cottage, twenty-eight acres of land, and six acres of
demesne, was granted to Sir Nicholas Malby and his heirs, at 16s. per
annum. Finally, January 29, 1615, James I. bestowed this monastery on
Francis, Viscount Valentia. About 1756 the lands passed into the hands
of Thomas Pakenham, when he was created Baron Longford, on the death of
the last Baron Aungier, and the extinction of that ancient family. What
was the extent and precise position of the abbey lands it is now
impossible to tell. O'Heyne assures us they were ample and valuable, and
even if we look only to the extent embraced under the church and
coenobium, together with the townlands which, from their names, we can
still recognize as abbey property, as Abbeycartron, there can be little
doubt they were very extensive.

Among the legends preserved in connection with Saint Brigid's, the story
of the martyrdom of Bernard and Laurence O'Ferrall, who died there for
the faith in 1651, deserves to be recorded.

The short but brilliant struggle of the Confederate Catholics, marred by
divided councils and the incapacity of some of its chiefs, was over. The
seven years' war ended with an unsatisfactory peace, when the execution
of the King in January, 1649, threw the country once more into turmoil
and confusion. Then came the brief but sanguinary struggle against the
parliamentary army under Cromwell. After the fall of Drogheda, Wexford,
and other towns, in which massacres of the most fearful kind had been
perpetrated, the parliamentary army, broken up into scattered bands,
traversed the country in search of disaffected, and Papists, sacking and
plundering with a license and cruelty that spread terror and desolation
everywhere, so that there is scarce a hamlet or village in which the
memory of the savage deeds of Cromwell's soldiery is not dwelt upon with
horror to this day. A troop of these fanatics was stationed at Longford,
and in the terror of their presence and bloody deeds, the Convent o