COMGAL, saint. – Irish monk of the sixth century, of the Dal Araide, born in 517; around 557 he founded the famous monastery of Bangor on Belfast Loch, where he died in 602. Bangor, whose rule of life was particularly severe, flourished greatly in the seventh and eighth centuries; it then declined, only to rise again with the reform of s. Malachia in the twelfth century.
From Giona of Bobbio, who was writing around 640, it is known that C. was the teacher of s. Colombano; and forty years later, from Adamman, who was an intimate friend of s. Columba of Jona. A Vita Comgali, probably written by some monk of Bangor, may date from before the tenth century. Today, of Bangor, the most celebrated Irish abbey, there remain only a bell excavated from the ruins in 1793 and, in the Ambrosian Library of Milan, the manuscript known as the Bangor antiphonary, dated to between the years 680 and 691. It is believed that the manuscript was brought to the Irish monastery of Bobbio by Dungal; it remained there until 1606, the year in which the Ambrosian Library was founded.
The manuscript contains, in 72 pages, a collection of hymns, antiphons, psalms, collects, the Credo, the Pater, the names of Irish saints, and the list of the first fifteen abbots of Bangor, up to Cronan, who was living in 680–91. The first editor of the manuscript was Muratori (Anecdota Ambrosiana, IV, Padua 1713, 119–59). The Bradshaw Society reproduced it in phototype in two volumes, edited by E. Warren, The antiphony of Bangor, an early Irishman script, in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, London 1893, 1895.