Page:Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy vol XXXIII.djvu/572

244 centuries later, apparently in the fourteenth century, when the present lid was substituted for that which had originally been attached to it. After the Treaty of Limerick, Daniel O'Donel, the representative of the family to which the cumdach has always belonged, who was attached to the cause of the Stuarts, left Ireland for France, and took the cumdach with him. Twenty-seven years later he became a Brigadier General in the French army. In France the shrine was found once more to be in need of repair. O'Donel caused this work to be done in 1723, and at the same time provided it with a silver case, intended to protect it from further injury. It is interesting to observe that the shrine was then believed to contain a relic (pignus) of St. Columba, commonly called the "caah" (cathach), of the exact nature of which possibly nothing was known. The cumdach was, in fact, closed, and for at least two centuries, as will appear later, it had been held that it was unlawful to open it.

The cumdach remained in France for more than a century. It was found in 1802 in a "monastery or college at Paris," was brought to Ireland by Sir Capel Molyneux, and by him was handed over to his father-in-law, Sir Neal O'Donel, Bart., of Newport, County Mayo. Ten years later his son, Sir Neal O'Donel—the second baronet—employed Sir William Betham, then assistant to the Ulster King of Arms, to compile a pedigree of the O'Donel family. Sir William borrowed the shrine from Dame Mary O'Donel, to whom it had been bequeathed by her husband, the first Sir Neal, with a view to inserting a description of it in the pedigree; and while it was in his custody, in 1813, he performed the "unlawful" act of opening it. He found, contrary to current belief, that it contained a wooden box, "very much decayed," in which were some leaves of a Latin Psalter and "a thin piece of