Of these the Bull of Martin V., March 1429, informs us, that the convent was of the "Strict Observance". From the Bull of Eugene IV., March, 1433, in the relation of the motives for granting the Indulgence, we learn the character and extent of the disaster which had befallen Saint Brigid's. "In consequence of the wars prevailing in these parts, especially during the last six years, the church of St. Brigid at Longford had been destroyed by fire, and all the other buildings of the convent reduced to ruins. The necessary ornaments for decent celebration of divine worship were wanting, and the Religious had been of necessity compelled to pass to other houses". In a second Bull of the same pope, July 1438, we are told, "the Church of Saint Brigid had been consumed by fire, and _most_ of the convent buildings laid in ruins". The devastation is thus in some sort limited, which in the first was described as total. The church was rebuilt, and the convent restored, but not at all on the same scale of magnificence that O'Heyne so extols in the first. For several centuries, however, it continued to exercise a great influence on religion in the district, and to send forth able, fervent, and illustrious pupils, to maintain and defend the faith, at home and abroad. Thus we find Doctor Gregory O'Ferrall, an alumnus of Saint Brigid's, Provincial of Ireland in 1644. Afterwards we find him lending energetic aid to the confederate Catholics at Kilkenny. When the treachery and intrigues of Ormond had seduced the Catholic chiefs into a deceitful peace, without any guarantee for the free exercise of their religion, the name of the Dominican provincial Gregory O'Ferrall is one of the signatures to the spirited and indignant protest of the national synod convened at Waterford in 1646, by the celebrated John Baptist Rinuccini, to condemn the conduct of the men who had agreed to such a peace, at once unjust, iniquitous, and pernicious to the Catholic cause, which they had sworn to defend. "Gregory O'Ferrall", says O'Heyne, "was a man of most meek and mortified appearance, and was esteemed by the people a mirror of every virtue". He died in 1672.