The religious houses of Ireland had served many useful purposes in the social life of the people. They had provided hospitals for the sick, orphanages for poor children, refuges for the aged. The monks and nuns kept boarding schools, in which the boys and girls of the upper classes were educated. In a country where inns were few, they offered hospitality to travellers, sometimes even to the Lord Deputy himself. Learned men resorted to them. The establishments in the Pale supplied and paid soldiers for the King’s hostings ; the subsidies collected from them helped the King’s revenue.

These and similar considerations were urged, and urged in vain, even by English officials, to obtain exemption from the common fate for at least a few of the monasteries and convents. The religious, men and women alike, were driven out into a rough world, the ways of which most of them had forgotten or had never known. The lands and houses were assigned or sold to laymen or sometimes to corporations. In either case the new owners usually allowed the buildings to fall into ruin. It often happened that one or more parishes had been under the care of a monastery ; and thus, by its suppression, the spiritual interests of the parishioners suffered, as much as did their corporal ones, by the cessation of the various forms of charity formerly practised by the dispossessed monks and nuns.