At that very time, some of the other Cistercian monasteries under the protection of the native chieftains, and totally composed of Irishmen, were in a most prosperous condition, and merited the genuine esteem of princes and people. Thus, the Abbey of Assaroe, or Ballyshannon, under the fostering care of the Princes of Tyrconel, attained celebrity by the regularity of its monks and the learning and sanctity of its Abbots, three of whom were made Bishops at no distant intervals. Of Boyle Abbey, Co. Roscommon, the same can also be said; for it throve and flourished without royal favour or charter. On the other hand, Mellifont had a plethora of charters, for which the monks there must have paid dearly. But, surrounded as it was by covetous and not over-scrupulous neighbours in lawless times, such safeguards were decidedly necessary. So, in 1329, Edward III. granted them a confirmation of all former privileges, together with the right of free warren in all their manors; and again in 1348, he gave them a fresh confirmation, with the right to erect a prison in any of their lands in the Co. Meath, and also the power to erect a pillory and gallows in their town of Collon. The Abbot then, as a temporal lord over his own manors, had power of life and death over his vassals therein; but he never exercised the authority so vested in him by condemning anyone to death, nay, even, he refrained from adjudicating on civil matters, as is seen by dispensations granted by Popes to Irish Cistercian Abbots freeing them from the obligation of acting as Justices. It is recorded that in 1329, in the battle in which the Louth men killed their new Earl, John Birmingham, "there fell Caech O'Carroll, that famous tympanist and harper, so pre-eminent that he was a phoenix in his art, and with him fell about twenty tympanists who were his scholars. He was called Caech O'Carroll because his eyes were not straight, but squinted; and if he was not the first inventor of chord music, yet of all his predecessors and contemporaries, he was the corrector, the teacher, and director." How it fared with Mellifont during the fearful pestilence that ravaged all Europe in 1348, is not related. Friar Clyn, the Franciscan Annalist, wrote of it:--"That pestilence deprived of human inhabitants, villages and cities, and castles and towns, so that there was scarcely found a man to dwell therein." The mortality in the religious houses was very great, and in some instances, only a few monks were left out of large and numerous communities. It is said that in these countries the religious Orders never recovered from the loss of the best and most learned of their members who were then swept away.