ST COMGALL. - An Irish monk of the 6th century, of the Dal Araidé, born in 517, founded about 557 the famous monastery of Bangor on Belfast Loch, where he died in 602. Bangor, with its very strict rule of life, flourished greatly in the 7th and 8th centuries; then it declined, only to revive with the reform of St Malachy in the 12th century.
From Jonas of Bobbio, who wrote about 640, it is known that C. was the teacher of St Columbanus; and forty years later, from Adamnan, who was a close friend of St Columba of Iona. A Life of Comgall, probably written by some monk of Bangor, may be earlier than the 10th century. Today of Bangor, the most celebrated Irish abbey, nothing remains but a bell recovered from the ruins in 1793 and, in the Ambrosian Library in Milan, the manuscript known as the Bangor Antiphonary, dated between the years 680-691. The manuscript is believed to have been brought to the Irish monastery of Bobbio by Dungal; it remained there until 1606, the year of the foundation of the Ambrosian Library.
The manuscript contains, in 72 pages, a collection of antiphons, psalms, collects, the Creed, the Pater, names of Irish saints and the list of the first fifteen abbots of Bangor down to Cronan, who was living at the time (680-691). The first editor of the manuscript was Muratori (*Anecdota Ambrosiana*, IV, Padua 1713, 119-59). The Bradshaw Society has reproduced it in facsimile in two volumes, edited by E. Warren, *The Antiphonary of Bangor, an Early Irish Manuscript in the Ambrosian Library at Milan*, London 1893, 1895.