In the year 558 the great monastery of _Bennchar_, or Bangor, was founded in the county of Down, the ancient territory of the Irish Picts, by Comgall, who was of that race and had been a companion of Columba at Glaisnaoidhen. It was situated on the south side of Belfast Lough; and the following account of it is given in his Life:—‘So great a multitude of monks then came to Comgall that they could not be maintained in one place, and hence they possessed several cells and many monasteries not only in the region of the Ultonians, but throughout the other provinces of Ireland; and in these different cells and monasteries three thousand monks were under the care of the holy father Comgall; but the greater and more memorable of them was the monastery of Bennchar.’[111] St. Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, in his Life of St. Malachy, written in the twelfth century, tells us that Bennchar was given to him by the lord of the land, that he might build, or rather rebuild, a monastery there; ‘for,’ he says, ‘a most noble monastery had existed there under its first father Comgall, which, as the head of many monasteries, produced many thousand monks. This sacred place was so fertile of saints and so abundantly bore fruit to God, that one of the sons of that holy fraternity, called Luanus, is said to have been alone the founder of no fewer than a hundred monasteries, filling Ireland and Scotland with its offspring, and not only in these, but even in foreign countries these swarms of saints poured forth like an inundation, among whom Saint Columbanus, penetrating thence to these our Gallican regions, erected the monastery of Luxeuil.’[112] Angus the Culdee in his Litany invokes ‘forty thousand monks, with the blessing of God, under the rule of Comgall of Bangor,’ but this number has probably been written for four thousand in the text.[113] The Luanus mentioned by St. Bernard was Lugidus, or Molua, of Clonfert-Molua, now Clonfertmulloe, on the boundary between Leinster and Munster, and his monasteries were mainly founded in the southern half of Ireland. It was, as we have seen, by the mission of Columbanus to Gaul that this Monastic Church of Ireland was brought into contact with the Continental Church. We have already adverted to some of the external peculiarities which distinguished it from the Roman Church at this period; and we must now consider more in detail the features which characterised it in the aspect in which it presents itself to us in its home in Ireland. [Sidenote: The primitive Irish monastery.]