Qualla: Buttevant Franciscan Friary

Buttevant Franciscan Friary: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. The last list of names is the saddest part of the story. Sometime around 1820, Bishop William Coppinger of Cloyne, working from memory, wrote down the four Franciscans who had been the final community at Buttevant. 'Pat Daly, a Friar of Buttevant died of gout and scurvy; Pat O'Neill, a Friar of Buttevant died of a fever in Cork; David Roche, a Friar of Buttevant, of exemplary conduct, died of a fever in Buttevant; and Daniel McAuliffe, a Friar of Buttevant, unemployed and turned horse jobber, died old.' That was the end of nearly six hundred years of Franciscan presence in this town. David Og de Barry had founded the friary in 1251, dedicated to Thomas Becket. Now the Franciscans were gone, and only their church was left, on the steep bank of the Awbeg in the middle of Buttevant.

Image: Andreas F. Borchert | CC BY-SA 4.0

Buttevant Franciscan Friary: Friars of Two Nations

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Charles MountCmount, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1324, Buttevant was important enough to maintain a studium - a house of studies - and the community included both Irish and Anglo-Norman friars. The combination did not always sit easily. In 1327, a commission established by Pope John XXII to investigate the Irish Province of ...

Image: Charles MountCmount | CC BY-SA 3.0

Buttevant Franciscan Friary: Edmund Spenser's Lease

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User: (WT-shared) Spircle at wts wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 4.0. The dissolution came around 1540. The examining jurors valued the entire complex - church, conventual buildings, garden, cemetery, a watermill - at 36 shillings and 8 pence. In 1570, James de Barry, the 4th Viscount Buttevant, took a twenty-one-year lease of the friary site at an...

Image: User: (WT-shared) Spircle at wts wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 4.0

Buttevant Franciscan Friary: Murrough of the Burnings

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. When the Irish Rebellion broke out in 1641, the Buttevant Franciscans welcomed the Confederate Catholic army of Lord Mountgarret. The guardian, Father Boetius Egan, marched with the army and sat in the Confederate Parliament at Kilkenny in 1642. The Munster phase of the war that ...

Image: Andreas F. Borchert | CC BY-SA 4.0

Buttevant Franciscan Friary: The Tower That Fell

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. By 1820 the Franciscans were gone. The poet's lease was a memory. The Barrys' tombs - and those of the Fitzgeralds, Lombards, MacDonaghs, and other Munster nobles - were still in the church, but the central tower above them, supported on arches that Samuel Lewis later called 'of ...

Image: Andreas F. Borchert | CC BY-SA 4.0