Bective in the barony of Navan and on the river Boyne. Murchard O'Melaghlin, king of Meath, founded the Cistercian abbey of Bective in the year 1146, under the invocation of the Virgin Mary.
The reader cannot but observe that a large number, if not the greater part, of the Irish monasteries was dedicated to the Mother of God. Always devotion to the Virgin Mary has been practised in Ireland. The poor reaper of Ireland on his autumnal pilgrimage to England to earn a few pounds wherewith to pay the Irish landlord a portion of his rack rent implored Mary, the star of the sea, to protect her dear Irish boy wherever he roamed, confident of her protection the Irish emigrant betakes himself to the waters of the mighty Atlantic and when the winds of heaven agitate the vast deep threatening with destruction the bark, to whose temporary keeping English rule and landlord oppression, worse than Egyptian bondage, have consigned him, the Irish Catholic, no other hope being left, entreats Mary to supplicate her Son, whom the seas and winds obey, in his behalf.
The abbey of Bective was called de Beatitudine
AD 1340 John was abbot.
AD 1488 the abbot, James of Castlemartin, received the king's pardon for the part he had taken in the affair of Lambert Simnell.
July the 31st and thirty fourth of Henry VII, the abbot surrendered, according to the acceptation of the word (in the English use it means forced to surrender), the possessions of this abbey, amounting to twenty messuages and one thousand two hundred acres of arable and pasture land in the county of Meath, became involved in the general confiscation and yet, as the royal plunderer progressed in his sacrilegious career, new wants arose, seemingly as cruel and as tyrannic as his thirst for the blood of his faithless wives.
The abbot of Bective sat as a baron in parliament, Large ruins of Bective abbey still remain. The cloisters and tower are almost entire.
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