In "Threnodia Hiberno-Catholica", his death is described: "He was pursued into a cave by the heretics, who there cut off his head, placed it on a pole at the gates of a certain town and left his body to be devoured by the wild beasts." The historian William Carrigan writes that according to local tradition, slaughter was committed on church people in Tinwear, a quarter of a mile from Durrow. According to Fearghus Ó Fearghail in "Kilkenny History and Society", "Bernard Fitzpatrick, who had administered the díocese after Bishop Rothe’s death from his hiding place in his ancestral home in County Laois, was tracked down and killed in 1653."