 Chapter 1 The Fortunes of the Family of Brian The last scene of the Irish monarchy before it entered on the anarchical period was not destitute of an appropriate grandeur. It was the deathbed scene of the Second Malachi, the rival, ally, and successor of the Great Brian. After the eventful day at Clomptarf he resumed the monarchy without opposition and for eight years he continued in its undisturbed enjoyment. The fruitful land of Mieeth again gave forth its abundance, and scourged by the spoiler, and beside its lakes and streams the hospitable arred rig had erected or restored three hundred fortified houses, where, as his poet's son, Shelter was freely given to guests from the king of the elements. His own favorite residence was at Dunnisketh, the Fort of Shields, in the northwest angle of Loch Enel, in the present parish of Dizzart. In the eighth year after Clomptarf, the summer of 1022, the Dublin Danes once again ventured on a foray into East Mieeth, and the aged monarch marched to meet them. At Athboy he encountered the enemy and drove them, routed and broken, out of the ancient mensal land of the Irish kings. Thirty days after that victory he was called on to confront the conqueror of all men, even death. He had reached the age of seventy-three and he prepared to meet his last hour with the zeal and humility of a true Christian. To Dunnisketh repaired amulgade, Archbishop of Armuk, the abbots of Clompt McNoise and of Durrow, with a numerous train of the clergy. For greater solitude the dying king was conveyed into an island of the lake opposite his fort, then called in his crow, now cormorant island, and there, after intense penance, on the fourth of the knowns of September precisely, died Malachi, son of Donald, son of Dunna, in the fond language of the Bards, the pillar of the dignity and the nobility of the western world, and the seniors of all Ireland sung masses, hymns, psalms, and canticles for the welfare of his soul. This, says the old translator of the Clompt McNoise annals, was the last king of Ireland of Irish blood, that had the crown, yet there were seven kings after without crown, before the coming in of the English. Of these seven subsequent kings we are to write under the general title of the War of Secession. They are called Ardrig gofrisibah, that is, kings opposed or unrecognized by certain tribes or provinces. For it was essential to the completion of the title, as we have before seen, that when the claimant was of Ulster he should have Canot and Munster, or Lenster and Munster, in his obedience. In other words he should be able to command the allegiance of two-thirds of his suffragions. If of Munster he should be equally potent in the other provinces, in order to rank among the recognized kings of Arryn. Whether some of the seven kings were subsequent to Malachi II, who assumed the title, were not fairly entitled to it, we do not presume to say. It is our simpler task to narrate the incidents of that brilliant War of Succession, which occupies almost all the interval between the Danish and Anglo-Norman invasions. The chant of the funerary mass of Malachi was hardly heard upon Lachenol, when Danna O'Brien dispatched his agents, claiming the crown from the provincial princes. He was the eldest son of Brian by his second marriage, and his mother was an O'Connor, an additional source of strength to him in the western province. It had fallen to the lot of Danna and his older brother, Teague, or Thaddeus, to conduct the remnant of the Dalkassians from Klontarf to their home. Marching through Ossary by the great southern road, they were attacked in their enfeebled state by the lord of that brave little border territory, on whom Brian's hand had fallen with heavy displeasure. Wounded as many of them were, they fought their way desperately towards Kassel, leaving one hundred and fifty men dead in one of their skirmishes. Of all who had left the Shannon side to combat with the enemy, but eight hundred and fifty men lived to return to their homes. No sooner had they reached Kinkora than a fierce dispute arose between the friends of Teague and Danna, as to which should reign over Munster. A battle ensued with doubtful result, but by the intercession of the clergy this unnatural feud was healed, and the brothers reigned conjointly for nine years afterwards, until Teague fell in an engagement in Eli, Queen's country, as was charged and believed by the machinations of his colleague and brother. Thurlug, son of Teague, was the foster son, and at this time the guest or hostage of Dermot of Lenster, the founder of the McMurrah family, which had now risen into the rank justly forfeited by the traitor Malmurrah. When he reached man's age he married the daughter of Dermot, and we shall soon hear of him again asserting in Munster the pretensions of the eldest surviving branch of the O'Brien family. The death of his brother and of Malachi within the same year proved favorable to the ambition of Danna O'Brien. All Munster submitted to his sway, Cannot was among the first to recognize his title as Ard Rieg. Ossary and Lenster, though unwillingly, gave in their adhesion. But Miethe refused to recognize him and placed its government in commission, in the hands of Conalachlan, the arch-poet and Corcoran, the priest, all ready more than once mentioned. The country north of Miethe obeyed Flattery O'Neill of Eliac, whose ambition, as well as all that of his house, was to restore the northern supremacy, which had continued unbroken, from the fourth to the ninth century. This flairity was a vigorous, able, and pious prince who held stoutly on to the northern half-kingdom. In the year 1030 he made the frequent but adventurous pilgrimage to Rome, from which he is called, in the pedigree of his house, Trosten, or the cross-bearer. The greatest obstacle, however, to the complete ascendancy of Danna arose in the person of his nephew, now advanced to manhood. Thorla O'Brien possessed much of the courage and ability of his grandfather, and he had at his side a faithful and powerful ally in his foster-father, Dermot of Lenster. Rightly or wrongly, on proof or on suspicion, he regarded his uncle as his father's murderer, and he pursued his vengeance with a skill and constancy worthy of Hamlet. At the time of his father's death he was a mere lad in his fourteenth year. But as he grew older he accompanied his foster-father in all his expeditions, and rapidly acquired a soldier's fame. By marriage with Dervour-girl, daughter of the Lord of Ossery, he strengthened his influence at the most necessary point, and what with so good a cause, and such fast friends as he made in exile, his success against his uncle is little to be wondered at. Lenster and Ossery, which had temporarily submitted to Danna's claim, soon found good pretexts for effusing him tribute, and a border war marked by all the usual atrocities raged for several successive seasons. The contest is relieved, however, of its purely civil character by the capture of Waterford, still Danish, in 1037, and of Dublin in 1051. On this occasion, Dermot of Lenster bestowing the city on his son Morag, grandfather of Strongbow's ally, to whom the remnant of its inhabitants, as well as their kinsmen in man, submitted for the time with what grace they could. The position of Danna O'Brien became yearly weaker. His rival had youth, energy, and fortune on his side. The Prince of Connaught finally joined him, and thus a league was formed, which overcame all opposition. In the year 1058 Danna received a severe defeat at the base of the Galtees, and although he went into the house of O'Connor the same year, and humbly submitted to him, it only postponed his day of reckoning. Three years after O'Connor took Kinkura and Dermot of Lenster burned Limerick and took hostages as far southward as St. Brendan's Hill, Cali. The next year Danna O'Brien, then fully four-score years of age, weary of life and of the world, took the cross-staff and departed on a pilgrimage to Rome, where he died soon after in the monastery of St. Stephen. It is said by some writers that Danna brought with him to Rome and presented to the Pope, Alexander II, the crown of his father, and from this tradition many theories and controversies have sprung. It is not unlikely that a deposed monarch should have carried into exile whatever portable wealth he still retained, nor that he should have presented his crown to the sovereign pontiff before finally quitting the world. But as to conferring with the crown the sovereignty of which it was once an emblem, neither reason nor religion obliges us to believe any such hypothesis. Dermot of Lenster, upon the banishment of Danna, son of Brian, A.D. 1063, became actual ruler of the southern half-kingdom and nominal aardrig, with opposition. The two-fold antagonism to this prince came, as might be expected, from Connor, son of Malachi, the head of the southern high-neil dynasty, and from the chiefs of the elder dynasty of the north. Thorlag O'Brien, now king of Casual, loyally repaid by his devoted adherents, the deep debt he owed in his struggles and his early youth to Dermot. There are few instances in our annals of a more devoted friendship than existed between these brave and able princes through all the chances of a half-century. No one act seems to have broken through the lifelong intimacy of Dermot and Thorlag. No cloud ever came between them, no mistrust, no distrust. Rare and precious felicity of human experience. How many myriads of men have sighed out their souls in vain desire for that best blessing which heaven can bestow, a true, unchanging, unsuspecting friend? To return, Connor O'Megleglen could not see, without deep-seated discontent, a prince of Lentster assumed the rank which his father and several of his ancestors had held. A border strife between Mieh and Lentster arose not unlike that which had been waged a few years before for the deposition of Duna between Lentster and Ossary on the one part and Munster on the other. Various were the encounters whose obscure details are seldom preserved to us. But the good fortune of Dermot prevailed in all until in the year 1070 he lost Morag, his heir, by a natural death at Dublin, and Gleignard, another son, fell in battle with the men of Mieh. Two years later, in the battle of Ova in the same territory and against the same enemy, Dermot himself fell, with the Lord of Forth and a great host of Dublin Danes and Lentster men. The triumph of the son of Malachi and the sorrow and anger of Lentster are equally great. The Bards have sung the praise of Dermot in strains which history accepts. They praise his ready aspect in laughing teeth. They remember how he upheld the standard of war, and none dared contend with him in battle. They denounce vengeance on Mieh as soon as his death-feast is over, a vengeance too truly pursued. As a picture of the manners and habits of thought in those times, the fate of Conor, son of Melligan, and its connection with the last illness and death of Thorlag O'Brien are worthy of mention. Conor was treacherously slain, the year after the battle of Ova, in a parley with his own nephew, though the parley was held under the production of Baxalisa, or Staff of Christ, the most revered relic of the Irish Church. After his death his body was buried in the great church of Clon McNoise, in his own patrimony. But Thorlag O'Brien, perhaps, from his friendship for Dermot, carried off his head, as the head of an enemy, to Kinkora. When it was placed in his presence in his palace, a mouse ran out from the dead man's head, and under the king's mantle, which occasioned him such a fright that he grew suddenly sick, his hair fell off, and his life was disbared of. It was on Good Friday that the buried head was carried away, and on Easter Sunday it was tremblingly restored again, with two rings of gold as a peace offering to the church. Thus were God and St. Curran vindicated. Thorlag O'Brien slowly regained his strength, though Keating, and the authors he followed, think he was never the same man again, after the fright he received from the head of Conor O'Melogun. He died peaceably, and full of penitence, at Kinkora, on the eve of the eyes of July, AD 1086, after severe physical suffering. He was in the seventy-seventh year of his age, the thirty-second of his rule over Munster, and the thirteenth, since the death of Dermot of Lenster, in his actual sovereignty of the southern half, and nominal rule of the whole kingdom. He was succeeded by his son, Murkertok, or Murtog, afterwards called Mor, or the Great. We have thus traced to the third generation the political fortunes of the family of Brian, which includes so much of the history of those times. That family had become, and was long destined to remain, the first in rank and influence in the southern half kingdom. But internal discord in a great house, as in a great state, is fatal to the peaceable transmission of power. That acknowledged right of birth, to which a famous historian attributes the peaceful successions of modern Europe, was too little respected in those ages in many countries of Christendom, and had no settled prescription in its favour among the Irish. Prima-geniture and the whole scheme of feudal dependence seems to have been an essential preparative for modern civilization, but as Ireland had escaped the legions of Rome, so she existed without the circle of feudal organization. When that system did at length appear upon her soil, it was embodied in an invading host, and Patriot Zeal could discern nothing good, nothing imitable in the laws and customs of an enemy, whose armed presence in the land was an insult to its inhabitants. Thus did our island twice lose the discipline which elsewhere laid the foundation of great states, once in the Roman and again in the feudal era. CHAPTER II. THE CONTEST BETWEEN THE NORTH AND SOUTH RISE OF THE FAMILY OF O'CONNOR. Four years before the death of Thorlag O'Brien, a prince destined to be the lifelong rival of his great son, had succeeded to the kingship of the northern tribes. This was Donald, son of Ardgal, prince of Eliac, sometimes called O, and sometimes Mac Loughlin. Donald had reached the mature age of forty when he succeeded in the course of nature to his father, Ardgal, and was admitted the first man of the north, not only in station, but for personal graces and accomplishments, for wisdom, wealth, liberality, and love of military adventure. Murkertok, or Murthog O'Brien, was of nearly the same age as his rival, and is equal, if not superior in talents, both for peace and war. During the last years of his father's reign in illness he had been the real ruler of the south, and had enforced the claims of casual on all the tribes of Leath Maghla, from Dublin to Galway. In the year 1094 by Mutual Compact, brought about through the intercession of the Archbishop of Armagh and the great body of the clergy, north and south, and still more perhaps by the pestilence and famine which raged at intervals during the last years of the eleventh century, this ancient division of the Midland Asker, running east and west, was solemnly restored by consent of both parties, and Leath Maghla and Leath Khan became for the moment independent territories. So thoroughly did the Church enter into the arrangement that at the Synod of Roth Brazil, held a few years later, the seats of the twelve bishops of the southern half were grouped round the Archbishop of Cashelle, while the twelve of the northern half were ranged round the Archbishop of Armagh. The bishops of Miethe, the ancient mensel of the monarchy, seemed to have occupied a middle station between the benches of the north and south. Notwithstanding the solemn compact of 1094, Murthog did not long cease to claim the title, nor to seek the hostages of all Ireland. As soon as the fearful visitations with which the century had closed were passed over, he resumed his warlike forays, and found Donald of Eliac nothing loath to try again the issue of arms. Each prince, however, seems to have been more anxious to coerce or interest the secondary chiefs in his own behalf than to meet his rival in the old-style pitched battle. Murthog's annual march was usually along the Shannon into Letrim, then snort by Sligo, and across the Arran and Fin into Donegal and Derry. Donald's annual excursion led commonly along the Ban into Dalriada and Ulydia, when spiway of Nuri, across the Boine into Miethe, and from West Miethe into Munster. In one of these forays, at the very opening of the twelfth century, Donald surprised King Quora in the absence of his lord raised the fort and leveled the buildings to the earth. But the next season the southern king paid him back in kind when he attacked and demolished Eliac, and caused each of his soldiers to carry off a stone of the ruin in his knapsack. I never heard of the billeting of grit stones, exclaims a bard of those days, though I have heard of the billeting of soldiers, but now we see the stones of Eliac billeted on the horses of the king of the west. Such circuits of the Irish kings, especially in days of opposition, were repeated with much regularity. They seemed to have set out commonly in May or soon after the festival of Easter, and when the tour of the island was made they occupied about six weeks in duration. The precise number of men who took part in these visitations is nowhere stated, but in critical times no prince, claiming the perilous honor of Ard Rieke, would be likely to march with less than from five to ten thousand men. The movements of such a multitude must have been attended with many oppressions and inconveniences. Their encampment for even a week in any territory must have been a serious burden to the resident inhabitants, whether hostile or hospitable. Yet this was one inevitable consequence of breaking up of the Federal Center at Tera. In earlier days the Ard Rieke on his election, or in an emergency, made an armed procession through the island. Ordinarily, however, his suffragins visited him, and not he them, all Ireland went up to Tera to the face, or to the festivals of Baltine and Sauen. Now that there was no Tera to go to, the Monarch, or would-be Monarch, found it indispensable to show himself often, and to exercise his authority in person among every considerable tribe in the island. To do justice to Murtag O'Brien he does not appear to have sought occasions of employing force when on these expeditions, but rather to have acted the part of an armed negotiator. On his return from the demolition of Eliak, A.D. 1101, among the other acts of munificence, he, in an assembly of the clergy of Leath Moga, made a solemn gift of the City of Casual, free of all rents and dues, to the Archbishop and the clergy, for ever. His munifices to churches and his patronage of holy men were eminent traits in this prince's character, and the clergy of that age were eminently worthy of favors of such princes. Their interposition frequently brought about a truce between the northern and southern kings. In the year 1103 the hostages of both were placed in custody with Donald, Archbishop of Armog, to guarantee a twelve-months peace. But the next season the contest was renewed. Murtag besieged Armog for a week, which Donald of Eliak successfully defended, until the siege was abandoned. In a subsequent battle the northern force defeated one division of Murtag's allies in Avog, under the Prince of Lenzter, who fell on the field with the lords of Idron, Osiris, Desis, Cary and the Dublin Danes. Murtag himself, with another division of his troops, was on an incursion into Antrim when he heard of this defeat. The northern visitors carried off, among other spoils, the royal tent and standard, a trophy which gave new bitterness on the one side and new confidence on the other. Donald the Good Archbishop, the following year, A.D. 1105, proceeded to Dublin, where Murtag was, or was soon expected, to renew the previous peace between north and south, but he fell suddenly ill soon after his arrival and caused himself to be carried homewards in haste. At a church by the wayside, not far from Dublin, he was anointed and received the Viaducum. He survived, however, to reach Armog, where he expired on the twelfth day of first. Kellek, Latinized Kelsus, his saintly successor, was promoted to the primacy and solemnly consecrated on St. Adam's Day following, the twenty-third of September 1105. Archbishop Kelsus, whose accession was equally well received in Munster as in Ulster, followed in the footsteps of his pious predecessor in taking a decided part with neither Leath Maga nor Leath Kahn. When, in the year eleven-ten, both parties marched to Sleeve-Flood, with a view to a towns of battle, Kelsus interposed between them, the Bacchal Issa, and a solemn truce followed. Again, three years later, when they confronted each other in Ivyag undown, similar success attended a similar interposition. Three years later Murtag O'Brien was seized with so severe an illness that he became light to a living skeleton, and though he recovered sufficiently to resume the exercise of authority, he never regained his full health. He died in a spiritual retreat at Lismore on the fourth of the Ides of March, A.D. 1119, and was buried at Kiliho. His great rival, Donald of Leath Kahn, did not long survive him. He died at Derry, also in a religious health, on the fifth of the Ides of February, 1121. While these two able men were thus for more than a quarter of a century struggling for the supremacy, a third power was gradually strengthening itself west of the Shannon, destined to profit by the contest, more than either of the principles. This was the family of O'Connor, of Raskamon, who derived their pedigree from the same stock as the O'Neils, and their name from O'Connor, an ancestor who ruled over Canot towards the end of the ninth century. Two or three of their line before O'Connor had possessed the same rank and title, but it was by no means regarded as an adjunct of the House of Rathcrogan before the time at which we have arrived. Their co-relatives, sometimes their rivals, but oftener their allies, were the O'Rourkes of Brefney, McDermott's of Merloig, the O'Flarities of Eare or West Canot, the O'Shaughnesses, O'Haines, and O'Douda's. The great neighboring family of O'Kelley had sprung from a different branch of the far-spreading Gaelic tree. At the opening of the twelfth century, Thorlogmour O'Connor, son of Varari of the Yellow Hound, son of Hugh of the Broken Spear, was the recognized head of his race, both for valor and discretion. By some historians he is called the half-brother of Murtag O'Brien, and it is certain that he was the faithful ally of that powerful prince. In the early stages of the recent contest between North and South, Donald of Eliach had presented himself at Rathcrogan, the residence of O'Connor, who entertained him for a fortnight and gave him hostages, but Canot finally sided with Munster, and thus by a decided policy escaped being ground to powder as corn is ground between the millstones. But the nephew and successor of Murtag was not prepared to reciprocate to Canot the support it had rendered to Munster, but rather looked for its continuance to himself. Conor O'Brien, who became king of Munster in 1120, resisted all his life the pretentions of any house but his own to the southern half-kingdom, and against a less powerful or less politic antagonist his energy and capacity would have been certain to prevail. The posterity of Malachi in Mieeth, as well as the princes of Eliach, were equally hostile to the designs of the new aspirant. One line had given three, another seven, another twenty kings to Aaron, but who had ever heard of an arc rig coming out of Canot? T'was so they reasoned in those days of fierce family pride, and so they acted. Yet Thorlog, son of Rury, son of Hugh, proved himself in the fifteen years' war previous to his accession, ten twenty-one to ten twenty-six, more than a match for all his enemies. He had been the chief of his tribe since the year 1106, and from the first had begun to lay his far forecasting plans for the sovereignty. He had espoused the cause of the house of O'Brien, and had profited by that alliance. Nor were all his thoughts given to war. He had bridged the river Suka at Balanaslo, and the Shannon at Athlone, and Shannon Harbour, and the same year these works were finished, 1120 or twenty-one, he celebrated the ancient games at Tal Tien, in assertion of his claim to the monarchy. His main difficulty was the stubborn pride of Munster, and the valor and enterprise of Connor O'Brien, later named Connor of the Fortresses. Of the years following his assertion of his title, few passed without war between those provinces. In 1121 and 1127 Thorlog triumphed in the South, took hostages from Lismore to Tralee, and returned home exultingly. A few years later the tide turned, and Connor O'Brien was equally victorious against him in the heart of his own country. Thorlog played off in the South the ancient jealousy of the Eugenian Houses against the Dalcassians, and thus weakened both to his own advantage. In the year 1126 he took Dublin and raised his son to the Lordship as Dermot of Lentster, and Thorlog O'Brien had done formerly. Marching southward he encamped in Ormond, from Llamas to St. Bridget's Day, and overran Munster with his troops in all directions, taking Cork, Cashel, Ardfinan, and Tralee. Kelsus, the holy primate of Ardmog, ignoring the evils of this protracted year, left his peaceful city and spent thirteen months in the South and West, endeavoring to reconcile and bind over to the peace the contending kings. In these days the Irish hierarchy performed, perhaps their highest part, that of peacemakers and preachers of goodwill to men. When in 1132 and 33 the tide had temporarily turned against Thorlog, and Connor O'Brien had united Munster, Lentster, and Mieth against him, the Archbishop of Tuam performed effectually the Office of Mediator, preserving not only his own province but the whole country from the most sanguinary consequences. In the year 1130 the Holy Kelsus had rested from his labors, and Malachi, the illustrious friend of St. Bernard, was nominated as his successor. At the time he was absent in Munster as the vicar of the aged primate, engaged in a mission of peace when the Crozier and the dying message of his predecessor were delivered to him. He returned to Armagh where he found that Maurice, son of Donald, had been intruded as Archbishop in the interim, to this city peace, order, unity were not even partially restored until two years later, A.D. 1132. The reign of Thorlog O'Connor over Leath Moga, or as Ardrig with opposition, is dated by the best authorities from the year 1136. He was then in his 48th year, and had been chief of his tribe from the early age of 18. He afterwards reigned for twenty years, and as those years and the early career of his son Rodrick are full of instruction, in reference to the events which follow, we must relate them somewhat in detail. We again beg the reader to observe the consequences of the destruction of the federal bond among the Irish, how every province has found an ambitious dynasty of its own, which each contends shall be supreme, how the ancient of the great families grows insatiable as to the ancient rites and customs decay, how the law of Patrick enacted in the fifth century is no longer quoted or regarded, how the law of the strong hand alone decides the quarrel of these proud, unyielding princes. CHAPTER III. THORLOG MORROW-CONNOR, MURDERER OF THE MIRKERTAK OF ELIAC, A SESSION OF RODRIK O'CONNOR. The successful ambition of Thorlog O'Connor had thus added, as we have seen in the last chapter, a fifth dynasty to the number of competitors for the sovereignty. And if great energy and various talents could alone entitle a chief to rule over his country, this prince well merited the obedience of his contemporaries. He is the first of the latter kings who maintained a regular fleet at sea. At one time we find these cannot galleys doing service on the coast of Cork, at another cooperating with his land forces in the harbor of Derry. The year of his greatest power was the fifteenth of his reign, A.D. 1151, when his most signal success was obtained over his most formidable antagonists. Thorlog O'Brien, king of Munster, successful to Connor of the Fortresses, had on foot in that year an army of three battalions, or coths, each battalion consisting of three thousand men, with which force he overawed some and compelled others of the southern chiefs to withdraw their homage from his western namesake. The latter, uniting to his own the forces of Miethe and those of Lenster, recently reconciled to his supremacy, marched southward, and, encamping at Glanmire, received the adhesion of such eugenian families as still struggled with desperation against the ascendancy of the O'Brien's. With these forces he encountered at Monmar, the army of the south, and defeated them with the enormous loss of seven thousand men, a slaughter unparalleled throughout the war of succession. Every leading house in North Munster mourned the loss of either its chief or its tannists, some great families lost three, five, or seven brothers on that sanguinary day. The household of Kinkora was left without an heir, and many a near kinsman's seat was vacant in its hospitable hall. The O'Brien himself was banished into Ulster, where, from Merkertach, Prince of Elioch, he received the hospitality due to his rank and his misfortunes, not without an ulterior, politic view on the part of the Ulster Prince. In this battle of Monmore, Dermond McMurah, king of Lenster, of whom we shall hear hereafter, fought gallantly on the side of the victor. In the same year, but whether before or after the Munster campaign is uncertain, in Ulster Force having marched into Sligo, Thorlag met them near the Curlew Mountains, and made peace with their king. A still more important interview took place the next year in the plain, or moi, between the rivers Urne and Drows, near the present Bally Shannon. On the Bacchal Issa and the relics of Column Kill, Thorlag and Merkertach made a solemn peace, which is thought to have included the recognition of O'Connor's supremacy. A third meeting which was had during the summer at Miath, where were present, besides the Ard Righ, the Prince of Eliach, Dermond of Lenster, and other chiefs and nobles. At this conference they divided Miath into east and west, between two branches of the family of Meliklin. Part of Longford and South Letrim were taken from Ternin O'Rourke, Lord of Brefney, and an angle of Miath, including Athboy in the Hill of Ward, was given him instead. Earlier in the same year King Thorlag had divided Munster into three parts, giving Desmond to McCarthy, Ormond to Thaddeus O'Brien, who had fought under him at Moanmore, and leaving the remainder to the O'Brien, who had only two short years before competed with him for the sovereignty. By these divisions the politic monarch expected to weaken, to a great degree, the power of the rival families of Miath and Munster. It was an arbitrary policy which could originate only on the field of battle, and could be enforced only by the sanction of victory. Thorlag O'Brien, once king of all Munster, refused to accept a mere third, and carrying away his jewels and valuables, including the drinking-horn of the great O'Brien, he threw himself again on the protection of Murkertock of Elyak. The elder branch of the family of O'Meliklin were equally indisposed to accept half of Miath, where they had claimed the whole from the Shannon to the sea. To complicate still more this tangled web, Dermid, king of Lenster, about the same time, A.D. 1153, eloped with Devergoyle, wife of O'Rourke of Brefney, and daughter of O'Meliklin, who both appealed to the monarch for vengeance on the ravager. Up to this date, Dermid had acted as a steadfast ally of O'Connor, but when compelled by the presence of a powerful force on his borders to restore the captive, or partner of his guilt, he conceived an enmity for the aged king, which he extended with increased virulence to his son and successor. What degree of personal criminality to attach to this elopement it is hard to say. The cavalier in the case was on the wintry side of fifty, while the lady had reached the mature age of forty-four. Such examples have been where the passions of youth, surviving the period most subject to their influence, have broken out with renewed frenzy on the confines of old age. Whether the flight of Dermid and Devergoyle arose from a mere criminal passion is not laid down with certainty in the old annals, though national and local traditions strongly point to that conclusion. The four masters indeed returned state that after the restoration of the lady she returned to O'Rourke, another point wanting confirmation. We know that she soon afterwards retired to the shelter of Melafont Abbey, where she ended her dates towards the close of the century in penitence and alms-deeds. Mertog of Eliach now became master of the situation. Thorlog was old and could not last long. Dermid of Lentzter was forever estranged from him. The new arbitrary divisions, though made with the general consent, satisfied no one. With a powerful force he marched southward, restored to the elder branch of the Omeleklans the whole of Mietha, defeated Thaddeus O'Brien, obliterated Ormond from the map, restored the old bounds of Thormund in Desmond, and placed his guest, the banished O'Brien, on the throne of Kassel. A hostile force under Roderick O'Connor was routed and retreated to their own territory. The next year, A.D. 1154, was signalized by a fierce naval engagement between the galleys of King Thorlog and those of Mertog on the coast of Ineshhoen. The latter, recruited by vessels hired from the Gale and the galls of Cantire, the Aron Isles and Man, were under the command of Mxgeleg, the Canot fleet was led by Omele and Odouda. The engagement which lasted from the morning till the evening ended in the repulse of the Canot fleet and the death of Odouda. The occurrence is remarkable as the first general sea-fight between vessels in the service of native princes, and as reminding us forcibly of the lessons acquired by the Irish during the Danish period. Through the two years of life which remained to King Thorlog O'Connor, he had the affliction of seeing the fabric of power which had taken him nearly half a century to construct, abridged at many points, by his more vigorous northern rival. Mertog gave law to territories far south of the ancient Esker. He took hostages from the Danes of Dublin and interposed in the affairs of Munster. In the year 1156 the closing incidents which signalized the life of Thorlog O'Connor was a new piece which he had made between the people of Brefney, Miethe, and Canot, and the reception of hostages from his old opponent, the restored O'Brien. While this new light of prosperity was shining on his house he passed away from this life on the thirteenth of the Callens of June in the sixty-eighth year of his age and the fiftieth of his government. By his last will he bequeathed to the clergy numerous legacies which are thus enumerated by Joffrey Keating, namely four hundred and forty ounces of gold and forty marks of silver, and all the other valuable treasures he possessed, both cups of precious stones, both steeds and cattle and robes, chessboards, bows, quivers, arrows, equipments, weapons, armor, and utensils. He was interred beside the high altar of the Cathedral of Clawn McNoyce to which he had been in life and in death a munificent benefactor. The Prince of Eliach now assumed the title of monarch, and after some short-lived opposition from Roderick O'Connor his sovereignty was universally acknowledged. From the year eleven sixty-one until his death he might fairly be called Ardwig without opposition since the hostages of all Ireland were in those last five years in his hands. These hostages were returned at the chief seat of power of the northern dynasty, the fortress of Eliach, which crowns a hill nearly a thousand feet high at the head of La Suley. To this strong hole the ancestor of Murtag had removed early in the Danish period from the more exposed and more ancient Emmea besides Armog. On that hill some at the ruins of Eliach may still be traced, with its inner wall twelve feet thick, and its three concentric ramparts, the first enclosing one acre, the second four, and the last five acres. By what remains we can still judge of the strength of the stronghold which watched over the waters of La Suley like a sentinel on an outpost. No prince of the northern high Neal had for two centuries entered Eliach in such triumph or with so many nobles in his train as did Murtag in the year eleven sixty-one. But whether the supreme power wrought a change for the worse in his early character, or that the lords of Ulster had begun to consider the line of Khan as equals rather than sovereigns, he was soon involved in quarrels with his own providential suffragens which ended in his defeat and death. Most other kings of whom we have read found their difficulties in rival dynasties and provincial prejudices, but this ruler, when most freely acknowledged abroad, was disobeyed and defeated at home. Having taken prisoner the Lord of Ulytia, down, with whom he had previously made a solemn peace, he ordered his eyes to be put out, and three of his principal relatives to be executed. This and other arbitrary acts so roused the lords of Leath Khan that they formed a league against him, at the head of which stood Danna O'Carroll, Lord of Oriel, the next neighbor to the cruelly ill-treated chief of Ulytia. In the year eleven sixty-six this chief, with certain tribes of Tyrone and North Lethram, to the number of three battalions, nine thousand men, attacked the patrimony of the monarch, that last menace and disgrace to an Irish king. Murtag with his usual valor, but not his usual fortune, encountered them in the district of the Fuse, with an inferior force, chiefly his own tribesmen. Even these deserted him on the eve of the battle, so that he was easily surprised and slain, only thirteen men falling in the affray. This action, of course, is unworthy the name of a battle, but resulting in the death of the monarch, it became of high political importance. Roderick O'Connor, son of Thurlock Moore, was at this period in the tenth year of his reign over Connaught, and the fiftieth year of his age. Rothkrugin, the chief seat of his jurisdiction, had just attained to the summit of its glory. The site of this now almost forgotten palace is traceable in the Parage of Elpham, within three miles of the modern village of Tulsk. Many objects contributed to its interest and importance in Militian times. There were the Nastyagana, or place of assembly of the clans of Connaught, the sacred cave which in the druidic era was supposed to be the residence of a god, and the Rela Koranrig, the venerable cemetery of the pagan kings of the west, where still the red pillar stone stood over the grave of D'Athi, and many other ancient tomb could be as clearly distinguished. The relative importance of Rothkrugin we may estimate by the more detailed descriptions of the extent and income of its rivals, Kinkora and Eliach. In an age when rust common alone contained four hundred and seventy-four defied dunes, over all which the royal wrath presided, when half the tributes of the island were counted at its gate, it must have been the frequent rendezvous of armies, the home of many guests, the busy focus of intrigue, and the very Elysium of bards, storytellers, and mendicants. On an after-generation, Cathal, the red-handed O'Connor, from some motive of policy or pleasure, transferred the seat of government to the newly founded Balentober. In the lifetime of Thurlock Moor, and the first years of Roderick, when the fortunes of the O'Connor's were at their full, Rothkrugin was the co-equal in strength and splendor of Eliach and Kinkora. Advancing directly from this family seat, on the first tidings of Murtog's death, Roderick presented himself before the walls of Dublin, which opened its gates, accepted his stipend of four thousand head of cattle, and placed hostages for its fidelity in his hands. He next marched rapidly to Drogheda, with an auxiliary force of Dublin Danes, and there O'Carol, Lord of Oriel, Louth, came into his camp and rendered him homage. Retracing his steps he entered Lenster, with an augmented force, and demanded hostages from Dermagment Moor. Thirteen years had passed since his father had taken up arms to avenge the rape of Durvagoyle, and had earned the deadly hatred of the abductor. That hatred in the interim had suffered no decrees, and sooner than submit to Roderick the ravager burned his own city of ferns to the ground and retreated into his fastnesses. Roderick proceeded southward, obtained the adhesion of Ossary in Munster, confirming Desmond to McCarthy and Thoman to O'Brien. Returning to Lenster he found that Tyrnan O'Rourke had entered the province, at the head of an auxiliary army, and Dermed, thus surrounded, deserted by most of his own followers, outwitted and overmatched, was feigned to seek safety in flight beyond seas, AD 1168. A solemn sentence of banishment was publicly pronounced against him by the assembled princes, and Moorag, his cousin, commonly called Moorag Nagael, or of the Irish, to distinguish him from Dermed Nagael, or of the stranger, he was inaugurated in his stead. For Moorag Nagael they took seventeen hostages, and so Roderick returned rejoicing to Rath-Krogan and O'Rourke to Brefney, each vainly imagining that he had heard the last of the dissolute and detested King of Lenster. A popular history of Ireland, from the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics, Book III, by Thomas Darcy McGee, Chapter IV. State of Religion and Learning among the Irish, previous to the Anglo-Norman invasion. At the end of the eighth century, before entering on the Norwegian and Danish wars, we cast a backward glance on the Christian ages over which we have passed, and now again we have arrived at the close of an era, when a rapid retrospect of the religious and social condition of the country requires to be taken. The disorganization of the ancient Celtic constitution has already been sufficiently described. The rise of the great families and their struggles for supremacy have also been briefly sketched. The substitution of the clan for the race of pedigree for patriotism has been exhibited to the reader. We have now to turn to the inner life of the people, and to ascertain what substitutes they found in their religious and social condition for the absence of a fixed constitutional system, and the strength and stability which such a system confers. The followers of Odin, though they made no proselytes to their horrid creed among the children of St. Patrick, succeeded in inflicting many fatal wounds on the Irish Church. The schools, monasteries and nunneries situated on harbours or rivers, or within a convenient march of the coast, were their first objects of attack. Teachers and pupils were dispersed, or if taken, put to death, or escaping, were driven to resort to arms in self-defense. Bishops could no longer reside in their seas, nor anchorites in their cells unless they invited martyrdom, a fact which may perhaps, in some degree, account for the large number of Irish ecclesiastics, many of them in episcopal orders, who are found in the ninth century, in Gaul and Germany, at Reims, Mintes, Ratzesban, Fulda, Cologne, and other places, already Christian. But it was not in the banishment of masters the destruction of libraries and school buildings the worst consequences of the Gentile War were felt. Their ferocity provoked retaliation in kind, and effaced, first among the military class, and gradually from among all others, that growing gentleness of manners and clemency of temper which we can trace in such princes as Neal of the showers and Neal of Cologne. A change in the national spirit is the greatest of all revolutions, and this change the Danish and Norwegian wars had wrought in two centuries among the Irish. The number of bishops in the early Irish church was greatly in excess of the number of modern dioceses. From the eighth to the twelfth century, we hear frequently of episcopy vagantes, or itinerant, and episcopy vagantes, or unbenefaced bishops. The provincial synods of England and Gaul frequently had to complain of the influx of such bishops into their country. At the Synod held near the hill of Usney, in the year 1111, fifty bishops attended, and at the Synod of Rath Brazill, seven years later, according to Keating, but twenty-five were present. To this period, then, when Celsus was primate and legate at the Holy See, we may attribute the first attempted reduction of the episcopal body to something like its modern number. But so far was this salutary restriction from being universally observed that at the Synod of Kels, A.D. 1152, the hierarchy had again risen to thirty-four, exclusive of the four archbishops. Three hundred priests and three thousand ecclesiastics are given as the number present at the first mentioned Synod. The religious orders, probably represented by the above proportion of three thousand ecclesiastics to three hundred secular priests, had also undergone a remarkable revolution. The rule of all the early Irish monasteries and convents was framed upon an original constitution which St. Patrick had obtained in France from St. Martin of Tours, who in turn had copied after the monarchism of Egypt and the East. It is called by ecclesiastical writers the Columban rule, and was more rigid in some particulars than the rule of St. Benedict, by which it was afterwards a planet. Among other restrictions, it prohibited the admission of all unprofessed persons within the precincts of the monastery, a law as regards females incorporated in the Benedictine Constitution, and it strictly enjoined silence on the professed, a discipline revived by the brethren of La Trape. The primary difference between the two orders, like perhaps in this, that the Benedictine made study in the cultivation of the intellect subordinate to manual labor and implicit obedience, while the Columban order attached more importance to the acquisition of knowledge and missionary enterprise. Not that this was their invariable, but only their peculiar characteristic, a deep-seated love of seclusion and meditation often intermingled with this fearless and experimental zeal. It was not to be expected in a century like the Ninth, especially when the Benedictine order was overspreading the West, that its milder spirit should not act upon the spirit of the Columban rule. It was, in effect, more social and less scientific, more a wisdom to be acted than to be taught. Armed with the syllogism, the Columbites issued out of the remote island, carrying their strongly marked personality into every controversy and every correspondence. In Germany and Gaul, their system blazed up in Virgilius, in Origina, in Macarius, and then disappeared in the calmer, slower, but safer march of the Benedictine discipline. By a reform of the same ancient order, its last hold on native soil was loosened when, under the auspices of St. Malachy, the Cistercian rule was introduced into Ireland the very year of his first visit to Clairvaux, A.D. 1139. St. Mary's Abbey, Dublin, was the first to adopt that rule, and the Great Monastery of Malefont, placed under the charge of the Brethren of the Primate, sprung up in Meese three years later. The Abbey's abective, boil, baltenglass, and monasternena date from the year of Malachy's second journey to Rome, and death at Clairvaux, A.D. 1148. Before the end of the century, the rule was established at Firmoy, Holy Cross, and Adornie, at Athlone and Nockmoy, at Newry and Asero, and in almost every triblant of Meese and Lindster. It is usually but erroneously supposed that the Cistercian rule came in with the Normans. For although many houses owed their foundation to that race, the order itself had been naturalized in Ireland a generation before the first landing of the formidable allies of Dermed on the coast of Wexford. The ancient native order had apparently fulfilled its mission, and long rudely lopped and shaken by civil commotions and pagan war, it was prepared to give place to a new and more vigorous organization of kindred holiness and energy. As the horrors of war disturbed continually the clergy from their sacred calling, and led many of them, even abbots and bishops, to take up arms, so the yoke of religion gradually loosened and dropped from the necks of the people. The awe of the eighth century for a priest or bishop had already disappeared in the tenth, when Christian hands were found to decapitate Cormac of casual, and offer his head as a trophy to the ard rea. In the twelfth century the archbishop and bishops of Connate bound to the synod of Trim were fallen upon by the current of Carbri the swift, before they could cross the Shannon, their people beaten and dispersed and two of them killed. In the time of Thorlow Moro-Connor a similar outrage was offered by Tyrnon or Rorke to the archbishop of Arma, and one of his ecclesiastics was killed in the assault. Not only for the persons of ministers of religion had the ancient awe and reverence disappeared, but even for the sacred precincts of the sanctuary. In the second century of the war with the Northmen we begin to hear of churches and cloisters plundered by native chiefs, who yet called themselves Christians, though in every such instance our analysts are careful to record the vengeance of heaven following swift on sacrilege. Claun McNoise, Kildare and Lismore were more than once rifled of their wealth by impious hands and given over to desolation and burning by so called Christian nobles and soldiers. It is some mitigation of the dreadful record thus presented to be informed, as we often are, especially in the annals of the 12th century, that the treasures so pillaged were not the shrines of saints nor the sacred ornaments of the altar, but the temporal wealth of temporal proprietors laid up in churches as places of greatest security. The estates of the church were, in most instances, farmed by laymen called Aranax, who, in the relaxation of all discipline, seemed to have gradually appropriated the lands to themselves, leaving to the clergy and bishops only periodical dues in the actual enclosure of the church. This office of Aranax was hereditary, and must have presented many strong temptations to its occupants. It is indeed certain that the Irish church was originally founded on the broadest voluntarism, and that such was the spirit of all its most illustrious fathers. Content with food and raiment, says an ancient canon attributed to St. Patrick, reject the gifts of the wicked beside, seeing that the lamb takes only that with which it is fed. Such, to the latter, was the maximum which guided the conduct of Coleman and his brethren, of whom Bede makes such honorable mention in the third century after the preaching of St. Patrick. But the magnificence of tribes and princes was not to be restrained, and to obviate any violation of the revered canons of the apostle, laymen, as treasurers and stewards over the endowments of the church, were early appointed. As those possessions increased, the desire of family aggrandizement proved too much for the Aranax, not only of Armagh, but of most other seas, and left the clergy as practically dependent on freewill offerings, as if their cathedrals or convents had never been endowed with an acre, a mill, a ferry, or a fishery. The free offerings were, however, always generous, and sometimes magnificent. When Celsus, on his elevation to the primacy, made a tour of the southern half-kingdom, he received seven cows and seven sheep, and half an ounce of silver from every cantrade, hundred, in Munster. The bequests were also a fruitful source of revenue to the principal foundations. Of the magnificence of the monarchs, we may form some opinion by what has been already recorded of the gifts left to churches by Thorlow Moore O'Connor. The power of the clerical order in these ages of pagan warfare had very far declined from what it was, when Adam Nan caused the law to be enacted to prevent women going to battle, when Molling obtained the abolition of the Lindster Tribute and column kill the recognition of Scottish independence. Truce is made in the presence of the highest dignitaries, and sworn to on the most sacred relics, were frequently violated, and often with impunity. Neither excommunication nor public penance were laterally inflicted as an atonement for such perjury. A fine or offering to the church was the easy and only mulked on the offender. When we see the safeguard of the Bishop of Cork, so flagrantly disregarded by the assassins of Mahon, son of Kennedy, and the solemn peace of the year 1094, so readily broken by two such men as the princes of the North and the South, we need no other proofs of the decadence of the spiritual authority in that age of Irish history. And the morals of private life tell the same sad tale. The facility with which the marriage tie was contracted and dissolved is the strongest evidence of this degeneracy. The worst examples were set in the highest stations, for it is no uncommon incident from the 9th century downwards to find our princes with more than one wife living, and the repudiated wife married again to a person of equal or superior rank. We have the authority of St. Anselm and St. Bernard for the existence of grave scandal and irregularities of life among the clergy. And we can well believe that it needed a generation of bishops with all the authority and all the courage of St. Celsus, St. Malachy, and St. Lawrence to rescue from ruin a priesthood and a people so far fallen from the bright example of their ancestors. That the reaction towards a better life had strongly set in, under their guidance, we may infer from the horror with which, in the third quarter of the 12th century, the elopement of Dermot and Dervogoyle was regarded by both princes and people. A hundred years earlier that event would have been hardly noticed in the general disregard of the marriage tie, but the frequent synods in the holy lives of the reforming bishops had already revived the zeal that precedes and ensures reformation. Prime and Malachy died at Clairvaux in the arms of St. Bernard in the year 1148, after having been 14 years Archbishop of Armagh and 10 years Bishop of Down and Conor. His episcopal life, therefore, embraced the history of that remarkable second quarter of the century in which the religious reaction fought its finest battles against the worst abuses. The attention of St. Bernard, whose eyes nothing escaped from Jerusalem to the farthest west, was drawn ten years before to the Isle of Saints, now, in truth, become an Isle of Sinners. The death of his friend, the Irish primate, under his own roof, gave him a fitting occasion for raising his accusing voice, a voice that thrilled the Alps and filled the Vatican against the fearful degeneracy of that once fruitful mother of holy men and women. The attention of Rome was thoroughly aroused, and immediately after the appearance of the life of St. Malachy, Pope Eugenius III, himself a monk of Clairvaux, dispatched Cardinal Popyrin with legantine powers to correct abuses, and established a stricter discipline. After a tour of the great part of the island, the legate with whom was associated a Gilacriost, or Christianus, Bishop of Lismore, called the Great Synod of Kells, early in the year after his arrival, March 1152, at which Semeny, usury, concubinage, and other abuses were formally condemned, and tithes were first decreed to be paid to the secular clergy. Two new archbishoprics, Dublin and Tuam, were added to our maw and casual, though not without decided opposition from the primates, both of Leth Maga and Leth Khan, backed by those stern conservatives of every national usage, the abbots of the Columban Order. The Pallium, or Roman Cape, was, by this legate, presented to each of the archbishops, and a closer conformity with the Roman ritual was enacted. The four ecclesiastical provinces, thus created, were, in outline, nearly identical with the four modern provinces. Our maw was declared the Metropolitan overall. Dublin, which had been a mere Danish burrowsee, gained most in rank and influence by the new arrangement, as Glendaloc, Ferns, ossury, Kildare, and Leland were declared subject to its presidency. We must always bear in mind the picture drawn of the Irish church by the inspired orator of Clairvaux, when judging of the conduct of Pope Adrian IV, who, in the year 1155, the second of his pontificate, granted to King Henry II of England, then newly crowned, his bull authorizing the invasion of Ireland. The authenticity of that bull is now universally admitted, and both its preamble and conditions show how strictly it was framed in accordance with St. Bernard's accusation. It sets forth that, for the eradication of vice, the implanting of virtue, and the spread of the true faith, the Holy Father solemnly sanctions the projected invasion, and it attaches as a condition the payment of Peter's Pence for every house in Ireland. The bearer of the bull, John of Salisbury, carried back from Rome a gold ring, set with an emerald stone, as a token of Adrian's friendship, or it may be his sub-infudation of Henry. As a title, however powerless in modern times such a bull might prove, it was a formidable weapon of invasion with a Catholic people in the twelfth century. We have mainly referred to it here, however, as an illustration of how entirely St. Bernard's impeachment of the Irish Church and nation was believed at Rome, even after the salutary decrees of the Synod of Kells had been promulgated. The restoration of religion, which was making such rapid progress previous to the Norman invasion, was accompanied by a relative revival of learning. The Dark Ages of Ireland are not those of the rest of Europe. They extend from the middle of the 9th century to the age of Brian and Malachy II. This darkness came from the north, and cleared away rapidly after the eventful day of Klontarf. The first and most natural direction which the revival took was historical investigation, and the composition of annals. Of these invaluable records the two of highest reputation are those of Tiernach, Tiernan, O'Brien, brought down to the year of his own death, A.D. 1088, and the Chronicle of Marianus Skotis, who died at Mintz, A.D. 1086. Tiernan was avid of Clan McNoise, and Marian is thought to have been a monk of that monastery, as he speaks of a superior called Tiernach, under whom he had lived in Ireland. Both these learned men quote accurately the works of foreign writers. Both give the dates of eclipses, in connection with historical events, for several centuries before their own time. Both show a familiarity with Greek and Latin authors. Marianus is the first writer by whom the name Skosha Minor was given to the Gaelic settlement in Caledonia, and his Chronicle was an authority mainly relied on in the disputed Scottish succession in the time of Edward I of England. With Tiernach, he may be considered the founder of the School of Irish Analysts, which flourished in the shelter of the great monasteries, such as Innisfallen, Boyle, and Multifernan, and culminated in the great compilation made by the Four Masters and the Abbey of Donegal. Of the Gaelic metrical chroniclers, Flann of the Monastery and Gila Coman, of the Bards McLeiag and McCoise, of the learned professors and lecturers of Lismore and Armagh, now restored for a season to studious days and peaceful nights, we must be content with the mention of their names. Of Lismore, after its restoration, an old British writer has left us this pleasant and happy picture. It is, he says, a famous and holy city, half of which is an asylum, into which no woman dares enter, but it is full of selves and monasteries, and religious men in great abundance abide there. Such was the promise of better days, which cheered the hopes of the pastors of the Irish, when the twelfth century had entered on its third quarter. The pious old Gaelic proverb, which says, On the cross the face of Christ was looking westwards, was again on the lips and in the hearts of men, and though much remained to be done, much had been already done, and done under difficulties greater than any that remained to conquer. End of Chapter 4 A popular history of Ireland, from the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics, Book 3, by Thomas Darcy McGee, Chapter 5, Social Condition of the Irish, Previous to the Norman Invasion. The total population of Ireland, when the Normans first entered it, can only be approximated by conjecture. Supposing the whole force with which Roderick and his allies invested the Normans in Dublin to be, as stated by a contemporary writer, some fifty thousand men, and that that force included one-fourth of all the men of the military age in the country, and further supposing the men of military age to bear the proportion of one fifth to the whole number of inhabitants, this would give a total population of about one million. Even this conjecture is to be taken with great diffidence and distrust, but for the sake of clearness it is set down as a possible Irish census towards the close of the twelfth century. This population was divided into two great classes, the Sar Clana, or Free Tribes, chiefly, if not exclusively, of Malaysian race, and the Dar Clana, or Unfree Tribes, consisting of the descendants of the subjugated older races, or of clans once free, reduced to servitude by the sword, or of the posterity of foreign mercenary soldiers. Of the Free Clans the most illustrious were those of whose princes we have traced the record, the descendants of Niel in Ulster, and Mjap of Kethir, Moor in Lenster, of Oliold in Munster, and of Iocad in Canot. An arbitrary division once limited the Free Clans to six in the Southern half Kingdom, and six in the North, and the Unfree also to six. But Jeffrey Keating, whose love of truth was quite as strong as his credulity in ancient legends, and that is saying much, disclaimed that classification, and collected his genealogies from principal heads, branching out into three families of tribes, descended from Iber Fin, one from Eir, and four from Eremhon, sons of Malaysians of Spain, and ninth tribe sprung from Ith, grand-uncle to the sons of Militius. The principal Iberian families' names were McCarthy, O'Sullivan, O Mahoney, O Donovan, O Brian, O Day, O Quinn, McMahon, of Clare, McNamara, O Carroll, of Eli, and Ogara. The Irian families were McGennis, O Farrell, and O Conner, of Cary. The posterity of Eremhon branched out into the O'Neill's, O Donnell's, O Doherty's, O Gallher's, O Boyle's, Megoigan's, O Conner's of Canot, O Flaherty's, O Hines, O Shaughnessy's, O Clare's, O Dowdus, McDonald's, of Antrim, O Kelley's, McGuire's, Cavanaugh's, Fitzpatrick's, O Dwyer's, and O Conner's of Ophily. The chief families of Ithian origin were the O'Driscoll's, O Leary's, Coffey's, and Clancy's. Out of the greater tribes many subdivisions arose from time to time when new names were coined for some intermediate ancestor, but the farther enumeration of these may be conveniently dispensed with. The Dark Lana, or unfree tribes, have left no history. Under the despotism of the Malaysian kings it was high treason to record the actions of the conquered race, so that the Irish Belgi, fared is badly in this respect at the hands of the Malaysian historians, as the latter fared in aftertimes from the chroniclers of the Normans. We only know that such tribes were, and that their numbers and physical force more than once excited the apprehension of the children of the conquerors. What proportion they bore to the Saar-Klana we had no positive data to determine. A fourth, a fifth, or a sixth they may have been, but one thing is certain. The jealous policy of the superior race never permitted them to re-ascend the plane of equality, from which they had been hurled at the very commencement of the Malaysian ascendancy. In addition to the enslaved by conquest, and the enslaved by crime, there were also the enslaved by purchase. From the earliest period slave dealers from Ireland had frequented Bristol, the great British slave market, to purchase human beings. Christian morality, though it may have mitigated the horrors of this odious traffic, did not at once lead to its abolition. In vain Saint Wolston preached against it in the South, as Saint Aden had done long before him in the north of England. Files of fair-haired Saxon slaves of both sexes yoked together with robes, continued to be shipped at Bristol, and bondmen and bondwomen continued to be articles of value, exchanged between the Prince and his subordinates, as stipend or tribute. The King of Casual alone gave to the Chief of the Eugenians, as part of his annual stipend, ten bondmen and ten women, to the Lord of Brewery, seven pages and seven bond women, to the Lord of D.C., eight slaves of each sex, and seven female slaves, to the Lord of Cary. Among the items which make up the tribute from Ulcerie to Casual are ten bondmen and ten grown women, and from the D.C. eight bondmen and eight brown-haired women. The annual exchanges of this description set down as due in the Book of Rights would require the transfer of several hundreds of slaves yearly, from one set of masters to another. Cruelties and outrages must have been inseparable from the system, and we can hardly wonder at the sweeping decree by which the Synod of Arma, A.D. 1171, declared all the English slaves in Ireland free to return to their homes, and anithmatized the whole in human traffic. The fathers of that council looked upon the Norman invasion as a punishment from heaven on the slave trade, for they believed in their purity of heart that power is transferred from one nation to another because of injustices, oppressions, and diverse deceits. The purchased slaves and unfree tribes tilled the soil, and practiced the mechanic arts. Agriculture seems first to have been lifted into respectability by the Cistercian monks, while spinning, weaving, and almost every mechanic calling, if we accept the scribe, the armorer, and the bell-founder, continued down to very recent tunes to be held in contempt among the gale. A brave man is mentioned as having been a weaving woman's son, with much the same emphasis as Jephtha is spoken of as the son of a harlot. Mechanic wares were disposed of at those stated gatherings, which combined popular games, chariot races for the nobles, and markets for the merchants. A bard of the tenth or eleventh century, in a desperate effort to vary the usual high-flown descriptions of the country, calls it, quote, Aaron of the Hundred Fair Greens, unquote, a very graphic, if not a very poetic, illustration. The administration of justice was a hereditary trust committed to certain judicial families who held their lands as the monks did, by virtue of their profession. When the posterity of the brejon, or judge, failed, it was permitted to adopt from the class of students a male representative in whom the judicial authority was perpetuated. The families of O'Nive and O'Cleary in the North, of O'daeli in Mi'eth, O'doran in Leinster, MacEagan in Munster, Mokunri or Conroy in Canot, were the most distinguished brejon houses. Some peculiarities of the brejon law relating to civil succession and sovereignty, such as the institution of tannistry, and the system of stipends and tributes, have been already explained. Parasite and murder were in later ages punished with death, homicide and rape by Eric or Fein. There were besides the laws of gavelkind, or division of property, among the members of the clan. Laws relating to boundaries, sumptuary laws regulating the dress of the various castes into which society was divided. Laws relating to the planting of trees, the trespass of cattle, and billeting of troops. These laws were either written in detail, or consisted of certain acknowledged ancient maxims, of which the brejon made the application, in each particular case, answering to what we call Judge Made Law. Of such ancient tracts as composed the Celtic Code, an immense number have fortunately survived, even to this late day, and we may shortly expect a complete digest of all that are now known to exist in a printed and imperishable form, from the hands of native scholars, every way competent to the task. The commerce of the country in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was largely in the hands of the Christian hibernodanes of the eastern and southern coast. By them the slave trade with Bristol was mostly maintained, and the Irish oak, with which William Rufus, Rufed Westminster Abbey, was probably rafted by them in the Thames. The English and Welsh coasts, at least, were familiar to their pilots, and they combined, as was usual in that age, the military with the mercantile character. In 1142, and again in 1165, a troop of Dublin Danes fought under Norman banners against the brave Britons of Cambria, and in the camps of their allies, sung the praises of the fertile island of the west. The hundred fares of Aaron, after their conversion and submission to native authority, afforded them convenient markets for disposing of the commodities they imported from abroad. The Gaelic mind, long distracted by the din of war from the purifying and satisfying influences of a Christian life, naturally fell back upon the abandoned half-forgotten superstitions of the pagan period. Proceeding every fresh calamity, we hear of signs and wonders, of migratory lakes disappearing in a night, of birds and wolves speaking with human voices, of showers of blood falling in the fields, of a whale with golden teeth stranded at Carlingford, of cloud ships with their crews seen plainly sailing in the sky. One of the marvels of this class is thus gravely entered into our annals, under the year 1054, quote, a steeple of fire was seen in the air over Rostalla on the Sunday of the Festival of St. George for the space of five hours. Innumerable black birds passed into and out of it, and one large bird in the middle of them, and the little birds went under his wings when they went into the steeple. They came out and raised up a greyhound that was in the middle of the town aloft in the air, and let it drop down again so that it died immediately. And they took up three cloaks and two shirts and let them drop down in the same manner. The wood on which these birds perched fell under them, and the oak tree on which they perched shook with its roots in the earth, unquote. In many other superstitions of the same age we see the latent moral sentiment as well as the over-excited imagination of the people. Such is the story of the stolen jewels of Clawn McNoise, providentially recovered in the year 1130. The thief in vain endeavored to escape out of the country from Cork, Lismore, and Waterford, quote, but no ship into which he entered found a wind to sail, while all the other ships did, unquote. And the conscience-stricken thief declared in his dying confession that he used to see St. Kieran, quote, stopping with his crozier every ship into which he entered, unquote. It was also an amiable popular illusion that abundant harvests followed the making of peace, the enacting of salutary laws, and the accession of a king who loved justice, and careful entry is made into our chronicles of every evidence of this character. The literature of the masses of the people was pretty equally composed of the legends of the saints and the older oceanic legend, so much misunderstood and distorted by modern criticism. The legends of the former class were chiefly wonders wrought by the favorite saints of the district or the island, embellished with many quaint fancies and tagged out with remnants of old pagan superstition. St. Columkil and St. Kieran were most commonly the heroes of those tales, which perhaps were never intended by their authors to be seriously believed. Such was the story of the great founder of Iona, having transformed the lady and her maid who insulted him on his way to Drumkef into two herons who were doomed to hover about the neighboring Ford till the day of doom, and such that other story of, quote, the three first monks, unquote, who joined St. Kieran in the desert, being a fox, a badger, and a bear, all endowed with speech and all acting apart in the legend true to their own instincts. Of higher poetic merit is the legend of the voyage of St. Brendan over the great sea, and how the birds which sung vaspers for him in the groves of the promised land were inhabited by human souls, as yet in a state of probation waiting for their release. In the oceanic legend we have the common stock of oriental ideas, the metamorphosis of guilty wives and haughty concubines into dogs and birds, the speaking beasts and fishes, the enchanted swans originally daughters of Lear, the boar of Ben Bulban, by which the champion Diarmid was slain, the phoenix and the stork of Ineschi, of which there never was but one, yet that one perpetually reproduced itself, the spirits of the wood and the spirits inhabiting springs and streams, the fairy horse, the sacred trees, the starry influences. Monstrous and gigantic human shapes, like the gins of the Arabian tales, occasionally enter into the plot and play a midnight part, malignant to the hopes of good men. At the reproach the earth is troubled, the moon is overcast, gusts of storm are shaken out from the folds of their garments, the watchdogs and the war dogs cower down in camp and wrath and whine piteously, as if in pain. The variety of grace and peculiarities of organization, with which, if not the original, certainly the Christianized Irish imagination, endowed and equipped the personages of the fairy world, were of almost Grecian delicacy. There is no personage who rises to the sublime height of Zeus or the incomparable union of beauty and wisdom in palace Athena. What forms bell or chrome or bride, the queen of Celtic song, may have worn to the pre-Christian ages, we know not, nor can know, but the minor creations of Grecian fancy, with which they peopled their groves and fountains, are true kindred to the brain, to the innocent, intelligent, and generally gentle inhabitants of the Gaelic fairyland. The city, a tender, tutelary spirit, attached herself to heroes, accompanied them in battle, shrouded them with invisibility, dressed their wounds with more than mortal skill, and watched over them with more than mortal love. The banshee, a sad, Cassandra-like spirit, shrieked her weird warning in advance of death, but with a prejudice eminently Malaysian, watched over only those of pure blood, whether their fortunes abode in hovel or hall. The more modern and grotesque personages of the fairy world are sufficiently known to render description unnecessary. Two habitual sources of social enjoyment and occupation with the Irish of those days were music and chess. The harp was the favorite instrument, but the horn or trumpet and the pibrock or bagpipe were also in common use, not only professional performers, but men and women of all ranks, from the humblest to the highest, prided themselves on some knowledge of instrumental music. It seems to have formed part of the education of every order, and to have been cherished alike in the palace, the shielding and the cloister. It is a poor church that has no music, is a Gaelic proverb as old perhaps as the establishment of Christianity in the land, and no house was considered furnished without at least one harp. Students from other countries, as we learned from Giraldus, came to Ireland for their musical education in the 12th century, just as our artists now visit Germany and Italy with the same object in view. The frequent mention of the game of chess, in ages long before those at which we have arrived, shows how usual was that most intellectual amusement. The chessboard was called in Irish fifth-chall, and is described in the glossary of Cormac, of Cashel, composed towards the close of the ninth century, as quadrangular, having straight spots of black and white. Some of them were inlaid with gold and silver, and adorned with gems. Mention is made in a tale of the twelfth century, of a, quote, man-bag of woven brass wire, unquote. No entire set of the ancient men is now known to exist, though frequent mention is made of, quote, the brigade or family of chessmen, unquote, in many old manuscripts. Kings of Bone seated in sculptured chairs about two inches in height have been found, and specimens of them engraved in recent antiquarian publications. It only remains to notice, very briefly, the means of locomotion which bound and brought together this singular state of society. Five great roads radiating from Terra, as a center, are mentioned in our earliest record, the road Dala, leading to Ossary, and so on into Munster, the road Assail, extending western through Mullingar, towards the Shannon, the road Cullen, extending towards Dublin and Bray, the exact route of the northern road Mid-Lucra is undetermined. Sleekmore, the great western road, followed the course of the Esker, or Hill Range, from Terra to Galway. Many crossroads are also known as in common use from the sixth century downwards. Of these the foremasters mention, at various dates, not less than forty, under their different local names, previous to the Norman invasion. These roads were kept in repair, according to laws enacted for that purpose, and were traversed by the chiefs and ecclesiastics in carbads, or chariots. A main road was called a sleigh, because it was made for the free passage of two chariots, quote, i.e., the chariot of a king and the chariot of a bishop, unquote. Persons of that rank were driven by an era, or charioteer, and no doubt made a very imposing figure. The roads were legally to be repaired at three seasons, namely for the accommodation of those going to the national games, at fair time, and in time of war. Weeds and brushwood were to be removed, and water to be drained off. Items of roadwork which do not give us a very high idea of the comfort, or finish, of those ancient highways. Such faintly seen from afar, and roughly sketched, was domestic life and society among our ancestors, previous to the Anglo-Norman invasion, in the reign of King Roderick O'Connor. End of Chapter 5 Chapter 6 of A Popular History of Ireland, Book 3 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Popular History of Ireland from the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics, Book 3, by Thomas Darcy McGee. Chapter 6 Foreign Relations of the Irish Previous to the Anglo-Norman Invasion The relations of the Irish with other nations, not withstanding the injurious effects of their war of succession on national unity and reputation, present several points of interest. After the defeat of Magnus Barefoot, we may drop the Baltic countries out of the map of the relations of Ireland. Commencing, therefore, at the north of the neighboring island, which in its entirety they sometimes called Innismore, the more intimate and friendly intercourse was always upheld with the Kingdom of Scotland. Bound together by early ecclesiastical and bardic ties, confronting together for so many generations a common enemy, those two countries were destined never to know an international quarrel. About the middle of the ninth century, A.D. 843, when the Scotto-Irish and Caledonia had completely subdued the Picts and other ancient tribes, the first national dynasty was founded by Kenneth McAlpine. The constitution given by this prince to the whole country seems to have been a close copy of the Irish. It embraces the laws of the tannistry and succession and the whole Brehyn Code as administered in the parent state. The line of Kenneth may be said to close with Donald Bain, brother of Malcolm III, who died in 1094, and not only his dynasty but his system ended with that century. Edgar, Alexander I, and David I, all sons of Malcolm III were educated in England among the victorious Normans, and in the first third of the twelfth century devoted themselves with the inauspicious aid of Norman allies to the introduction of Saxons, settlers, and the feudal system, first into the Lowlands and subsequently into Morayshire. This innovation on their ancient system and confiscation of their lands was stoutly resisted by the Scottish Gale. In Somerledd, Lord of the Isles and ancestor of the McDonald's, they found a powerful leader, and Somerledd found Irish allies always ready to assist him in a cause which appealed to all their national prejudices. In the year 1134 he led a strong force of Irish and Islesmen to the assistance of the Gaelic insurgents, but was defeated and slain near Renfrew by the royal troops under the command of the steward of Scotland. During the reigns of William the Lion, Alexander II, and Alexander III, the war of systems raged with all its fierceness and in nearly all the great encounters Irish auxiliaries, as was to be expected, were found on the side of the Gaelic race and in Gaelic rights. Nor did this contest ever wholly cease in Scotland until the last hopes of the steward line were extinguished on the fatal field of Culloden, where Irish captains formed the battle and Irish blood flowed freely, intermingled with the kindred blood of Highlanders and Islesmen. The adoption of Norman usages, laws, and tactics by the Scottish dynasties of the 12th and succeeding centuries did not permanently affect the national relations of Ireland and Scotland. It was otherwise with regard to England. We have every reason to believe, we have the indirect testimony of every rider from Bede to Malmsbury, that the intercourse between the Irish and Saxons, after the first hostility engendered by the cruel treatment of the Britons had worn away, became of the most friendly character. The Irish who fought at Brunnenberg against Saxon freedom were evidently the natural allies of the Northmen, the Dano Irish of Dublin, and the southern seaports. The commerce of intelligence between islands was long maintained, the royalty of Saxon England had more than once, in times of domestic revolution, found a safe and desired retreat in the western island. The fair Elgiva and the gallant Herald had crossed the western waves in their hour of need. The fame of Edward the Confessor took such a deep hold on the Irish mind that, three centuries after his death, his banner was unfurled and the royal leopards laid aside to facilitate the march of an English king through the fastnesses of Lenster. The Irish, therefore, were not likely to look upon the establishment of a Norman dynasty in lieu of the old Saxon line as a matter of indifference. They felt that the Norman was but a dain disguised in armor. It was true he carried the cross upon his banner and claimed the benediction of the successor of Saint Peter. True also, he spoke the speech of France, and claimed a French paternity. But the lust for dominion, the iron self-will, the wily devices of strategy bespoke the Norman of the twelf, the lineal descent of the Dain of the tenth century. When, therefore, tidings reached Ireland of the Battle of Hastings and the Death of Herald, both the apprehensions and the sympathies of the country were deeply excited. Intelligence of the coronation of William the Conqueror quickly followed and emphatically announced to the Irish the presence of new neighbors, new dangers, and new duties. The spirit with which our ancestors acted towards the defeated Saxons, whatever we may think of its wisdom, was at least respectable for decision and boldness. Godwin, Edmund, and Magnus, sons of Herald, had little difficulty in raising in Ireland a numerous force to cooperate with the earls Edwin and Morcar, who still upheld the Saxon banner. With this force wafted over in sixty-six vessels they entered the Avon and besieged Bristol, then the second commercial city of the kingdom. But Bristol held out and the Saxon earls had fallen back into Northumberland, so the sons of Herald ran down the coast and tried their luck in Somersetshire with a better prospect. Devonshire and Dorsetshire favoured their cause. The old Britons of Cornwall swelled their ranks and the rising spread like a flame over the east. Ednoth, a renegade Saxon, formerly Herald's master of horse, dispatched by William against Herald's sons was defeated in Slain. Doubling the land's end the victorious force entered the Tammer and overran South Devon. The united garrisons of London, Winchester and Salisbury were sent against them under the command of the Martial Bishop of Contentons, while a second force advanced along the Tammer under Brian, heir of the Earl of Brittany who routed them with the loss of two thousand men, English, Welsh and Irish. The sons of Herald retreated to their vessels with all their booty and returned again into Ireland where they vanished from history. Such in the Vale of Tammer was the first collision of the Irish and Normans and as the race of Rulla never forgot an enemy nor forewent a revenge we may well believe that even thus early the invasion of Ireland was decided upon. Meredith Henmer relates in his chronicle that William Rufus standing on a high rock and looking towards Ireland said, I will bring hither my ships and pass over and conquer that land. And on these words of the son of the conqueror being repeated to Merkertach O'Brien he replied, hath the king and his great threatening said if it please God? And when answered no, then said the Irish monarch, I fear him not, since he puteth his trust in man and not in God. Ireland, however, was destined to be reached through Wales and along that mountain coast we find early Norman castles and Norman ships. It was the special ambition of William Rufus to add the principality to the conquests of his father and the active sympathy of the Welsh with the Saxons on their inland border gave him pretexts enough. A bitter feud between North and South Wales hastened an invasion in which Robert Fitz-Amen and his companions played by anticipation the parts of Strongbow and Fitz-Steven in the invasion of Ireland. The struggle commenced under them was protracted through the reign of Rufus who led an army in person, AD 1095 against the Welsh, but with little gain and less glory. As an afterthought he adopted the device of his father followed too in Ireland by Henry II of partitioning the country amongst the most enterprising nobles gravely accepting their homage in advance of possession and authorizing them to maintain troops at their own charges for making good his grant of what never belonged to him. Robert Fitz-Amen did homage for Glamorgan, Bernard Newmarch for Breknock, Rojet de Montgomery for Cardigan, and Gilbert Declair for Pembroke. The best portions of North Wales were partitioned between the Mornimers, Lathamers, Delaces, Fitz-Allens, and Montgomerys. Rhys, Prince of Cambria with many of his nobles fell in battle defending bravely his native hills, but Griffith, son of Rhys, escaped into Ireland from which he returned some twenty years later and recovered by arms and policy a large share of his ancestral dominions. In the reign of Henry I AD 1110 a host of Flemmings driven from their own country by an inundation of the sea were planted upon the Welsh marches from which they soon swarmed into all the Cambrian glens and glades. The industry and economy of this new people in peaceful times seemed almost inconsistent with their stubborn bravery and battle, but they demonstrated to the Welsh and afterwards to the Irish that they could handle the Halberd as well as throw the shuttle, that men of trade may on occasion prove themselves capable men of war. The Norman kings of England were not insensible to the fact that Tsimeric element in Wales the Saxon element in England and the Gaelic element in Scotland were all more agreeable to the Irish than the race of Rallo and William. They were not ignorant that Ireland was a refuge for their victims and a recruiting ground for their enemies. They knew furthermore that most of the strong points on the Irish coast from the Shannon to the Liffey were possessed by Christian Northmen kindred to themselves. They knew that the land was divided within itself, weakened by a long war of succession groaning under the ambition of five competitors for the sovereignty and suffering in reputation abroad under the invective of Saint Bernard and the displeasure of Rome. More tempting materials for entry or fairer opportunities of aggrandisement nowhere present themselves and it was less want of will than of leisure from other and nearer contests which deferred this new invasion for a century after the battle of Hastings. While that century was passing over their heads an occasional intercourse not without its pleasing incidents was maintained between the races. In the first year of the twelfth Arnaught and Montgomery Earl of Chester obtained a daughter of Mercantock O'Brien in marriage the proxy on the occasion being Gerald the son of the Constable of Windsor and ancestor of the Geraldines. Mercantock according to Momsbury maintained a close correspondence with Henry I for whose advice he professed great deference. He was accused of aiding the rebellion of the Montgomery's against the Prince and if at one time he did so seems to have abandoned their alliance when threatened with repisals on the Irish engaged in peaceful commerce with England. The argument used on this occasion seems to be embodied in the question of Momsbury and has since become familiar. What would Ireland do? says the old historian if the merchandise of England were not carried to her shores. The estimation in which the Irish princes were held in the century preceding the invasion at the Norman Court may be seen in the style of Lanfrank and Anselm when addressing the former King Thurlog and the latter King Murkertock O'Brien. The first generation of the conquerors had passed away before the second of these epistles was written. In the first the letter runs Lanferkesse a sinner and the unworthy bishop of the Holy Church of Dover to the illustrious Teter Valkus King of Ireland blessing etc. etc. and the epistle of Anselm is addressed to Maria Darkus by the grace of God glorious King of Ireland Anselm servant of the Church of Canterbury greeting health and salvation etc. etc. This was the tone of the highest Ecclesiastics in England towards the Ruler of Ireland in the reigns of William I and Henry I and equally obsequious were the replies of the Irish princes. After the death of Henry I nineteen years of civil war and anarchy diverted the Anglo-Normans from all other objects. In the year 1154 however Henry of Anjou succeeded to the throne on which he was destined to act so important a part. He was born in Anjou in the year 1133 and married at 18 the divorced wife of the King of France. Uniting her vast dominions to his own patrimony he became the Lord of a larger part of France than was possessed by the titular King. In his 21st year he began to reign in England and in his 35th he received the fugitive Dermen of Lenster in some camp or castle of Aquitaine and took that outlaw by his own act under his protection. The centenary of the victory of Hastings had just gone by and it needed only this additional agent to induce him to put into execution a plan which he must have formed in the first months of his reign since the bull he had procured from Pope Adrian bears the date of that year 1154. The return from exile and martyrdom of Becket disarrayed and delayed the projects of the English King nor was he able to leave an expedition into Ireland until four years after his reception of the Lenster fugitive in France. Throughout the rest of Christendom if we accept Rome the name of Ireland was comparatively little known. The commerce of Dublin, Limerick and Galway especially in the article of wine which was already largely imported may have made those ports and their merchants somewhat known on the coasts of France and Spain. But we have no statistics of Irish commerce at that early period. Along the Rhine and even upon the Danube the Irish missionary and the Irish schoolmaster were still sometimes found. The Chronicle of Ratisbon records with gratitude the munificence of Connor O'Brien King of Munster whom it considers the founder of the Abbey of St. Peter in that city. The records of the same Abbey credit its liberal founder with having sent large presence to the Emperor Lothair in aid of the second crusade for the recovery of the Holy Land. Some Irish adventurers joined in the general European hosting to the Plains of Palestine but though neither numerous nor distinguished enough to occupy the page of history their glibs and colons did not escape the studious eye of him who sang Jerusalem delivered and regained. End of Chapter 6 of Book 3 of A Popular History of Ireland