In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, dozens of religious fraternities of lay men and women were founded in the area of eastern Ireland, known as the Pale. In Meath alone, there were at least twenty of these associations established in towns and villages throughout the county proportionately the highest number in any part of the Englishry of late medieval Ireland.' The vogue among lay men and women for banding themselves together in religious associations was widespread throughout late medieval Europe. Fuelled essentially by a desire to have their souls remembered in perpetuity in order to escape the pains of Purgatory, the primary function of the fraternity was celebration of mass by specially-appointed chaplain^.^ The grim mortality of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century had borne in upon Christians everywhere ever more acutely their tenuous hold upon life, and in the decades that followed, the survivors engaged in benefaction of religious institutions on a large scale.