A brilliant but paradoxical writer—I refer to Mr. Standish O’Grady—has, with unerring hand, sketched for us the state of Ireland when as yet the Norman adventurer had not set foot upon her shores.[340] To those who dream of a golden age, of a land in the enjoyment of peace and happiness till invaded by the ruthless stranger, the scene his pen reveals should prove a rude awakening. That Mr. O’Grady writes with unrivalled knowledge of his subject, is neither his only nor his chief claim to the confidence of those we speak of: they are more likely to be influenced by the fact that his sympathies are all with the Irish, that he cannot conceal his admiration for government by ‘battle-axe,’ and that he strives to justify what to English eyes could be nothing but a glorified Donnybrook Fair. He is wrathful with Mr. Freeman for picturing Ireland as only “the scene of waste tribal confusions, aimless flockings and fightings, a wilderness tenanted by wolves and wolfish men,” and claims that her history, in each generation, was at this time “that of some half-dozen strong men striving for the mastery ... a most salutary warfare, inevitable, indispensable, enjoined by nature herself.”

If we cannot agree with this able champion in viewing the warfare he describes as a healthy process of evolution, we may at least gladly admit that some knowledge of this dark period, lighted only by the lurid torch of rapine and internecine strife, is as essential to a right understanding of the Anglo-Norman settlement as is the study of English history, for some generations before the Conquest, the necessary prelude to a comprehension of the Norman Conquest itself.

It is not, however, for the Conquest only that this knowledge of the true state of Ireland ought to be acquired. The light it throws on the Irish people, their inherited and unchangeable tendencies, is of value from the parallel it presents to the latest modern developments. “Tribes and nations,” writes Mr. O’Grady, “had ceased to count”; the struggle was one in which, “released from all control,” some half a dozen rival kings “fiercely battled like bulls for the mastery of the herd.” No lively imagination, surely, is required to see the spirit of this strife renewed in the leaders of the present Irish party, or prophesy a revival, under Home Rule, of the days when “Turlough O’Conor and Tiernan O’Rourke were terribly at war—Ireland (the chronicler adds) a shaking sod between them.” Although, in the true Hibernian spirit, Mr. Standish O’Grady can speak of this as a “vast and bloody, but not ignoble strife,” I hold that its animating spirit was an ambition as ruthlessly personal as that which leads the Presidents of South American Republics to wade through blood to power, and to reduce their country to ‘a shaking sod’ for the gratification of their rivalry. It is the absolutely personal character of this strife which is fatal to Mr. O’Grady’s argument that a strong ‘Ardriship,’ or central rule, was in actual process of evolution before the invaders arrived. Where that rule was based only on personal prowess or strength of character, it was liable, at any moment, to be broken up by death, and once more replaced, if not by anarchy, at least by such internecine strife as has been the fate of Mr. Parnell’s party since the removal of his strong hand. There was, as Mr. O’Grady is never tired of reminding us, but one way, in those halcyon days, of securing the hegemony of Ireland: “a normal Irish king had to clear his way through the provinces, battle-axe in hand, gathering hostages by the strength of his arm”; he had to “move forward step by step, battle-axing territory after territory into submission.” The only vote known was given by “the mouth of the battle-axe”; and for the dissentient Irishmen of the time there were “always ready battle-axes and trained troops of swift raiders and plunderers.” Nor was it necessary for the Irish king to set his “trained plunderers and cattle drivers” at work on every occasion. The convenient and recognised institution of hostages provided him with some one he could hang or blind without the least trouble, and thus anticipate the fate which might very probably be his own.

Even the danger of interference from without could not permanently unite the Irish among themselves. The Scandinavian settlers had turned this weakness to account by siding now with one and now with another of the factions, and had finally made good their possession of the seaport towns, where they stood towards the rest of the island much like the Ulstermen of to-day, a hardy race of alien origin and long of hostile faith, merchants and seamen to whom the natives left all the traffic with other lands. One cannot but think from the small part they seem to have played in the struggle between the Irish and the Norman invaders that their heart was rather in trading than in war, and that the old wiking spirit had flickered down among them, or at least found a new vent. Not so with the Norman adventurers. That marvellous people had as yet preserved their restless activity, their boundless ambition, and their love of martial enterprise. Conquerors, courtiers, or crusaders, they were always lords in the end; the glamour of lordship was ever present above the Norman horizon. Ireland alone knew them not, and thither they had now begun to cast eager eyes. The wave that had spread itself over England and Wales had now gathered up its strength anew, and the time had come for it at last to break on the Irish shore.

It is at this point that the curious poem Mr. Orpen has so ably edited comes to our aid as an historical authority of singular value and importance. Although long known to scholars from Michel’s publication of its text (1837), it was described by Mr. Dimock, who knew its value, in the preface to his edition of Giraldus, as then “in great measure useless” from the want of competent annotation. He observed with truth that “no more valuable contribution, perhaps, to the history of the first few years of the English invasion of Ireland could be made” than a worthy edition of this poem. Such an edition Mr. Orpen may justly claim to have produced. The corrupt and obscure condition of the text demanded elucidation no less urgently than the Irish names with which it teems required special knowledge for their correct identification. It is not too much to say that Mr. Orpen has shown us how much can be done by skilful editing to increase the value of an authority. Avoiding the over-elaboration that one associates with German scholarship, he has provided his readers with an apparatus at once sufficient and concise. Text, translation, notes, map, chronology, and glossary, all are admirable in their way; and the patience with which the barbarous names, both of places and of persons, have been examined and explained is deserving of warm praise. As to the way in which a text should be treated scholars will generally differ in certain points of detail, but Mr. Orpen’s method shows us, at least, the exact state of the text from which he worked. There is still room, perhaps, for further conjectural emendation. For instance, in the lines—

where the editor is fairly baffled by ‘Crandone,’ perfect sense might at once be made by reading—

which would satisfy at once the conditions of metre, of locality, and of the context. So too, in the interesting Lacy charter printed on page 310, the editor might have detected in Adam de ‘Totipon,’ the Adam de ‘Futepoi’ of Giraldus, and the Adam de ‘Feipo’ of the poem: in records the name appears in both forms. The case of this man, one may add, is peculiarly interesting, because I have detected him as a knightly tenant of Hugh de Laci in England in the returns of 1166, in which he seems to be disguised as “Putipo.” He thus came, we see, to share in his lord’s greatness, becoming one of the leading ‘barons’ in his new dominion of Meath.

It is necessary to explain that although this poem, in the form here preserved to us, dates only from about 1220 to 1230, it enshrines materials contemporary with the actual invasion and conquest. For it is based upon a narrative which seems to have closed not later than 1176, and for which the trouvère or compiler of the poem was indebted to Maurice Regan, the interpreter, and, one might almost say, the diplomatic agent of king Dermot, whose matrimonial adventures were the causa causans of the whole story. In giving to the poem the name of “the Song of Dermot and the Earl,” the editor has brought out the fact that its narrative is chiefly concerned with the doings of Dermot and his son-in-law, ‘Strongbow,’ as the earl of Pembroke has been commonly named.[341] It is not improbable that the original work was only carried down to the earl’s death in 1176. Mr. Orpen lays special stress on the fact that there are but “two allusions pointing to a much later date,” and claims it as “a remarkable fact that, with the exception of these two allusions ... there is nothing, so far as I have observed, pointing to a later date than 1177.” He would seem, however, to have overlooked an allusion to John de Curci’s subsequent troubles in Ulster in the lines:

This, however, like the other two, would be only an addition by the later versifier, and does not affect the main fact that we are dealing with a metrical version of a story contemporaneous with the conquest, and enshrining in ll. 3064–3177 “the only connected account of the subinfeudation of Leinster and Meath ... that has come down to us, a sort of original Domesday Book of the first Anglo-Norman settlement.” As such, it has the advantage of date over the ‘Expugnatio’ of Giraldus; it is also instinct with evidence of native local knowledge; and, above all, it stands apart from any other authority in its independent point of view. Giraldus wrote, as is well known, largely with the object of glorifying his relatives, who made the invasion of Ireland almost a family undertaking; in Regan, on the other hand, we have the panegyrist of Dermot and the earl of Pembroke, who carried to such a height the spirit of party faction as to denounce as “traitors” all his countrymen who were opposed to Dermot and his foreign allies.

The opening lines are, unfortunately, imperfect and so obscure that the nature of the materials from which the trouvère worked and the exact share in their authorship due to Regan have been, and must remain, to some extent matters of conjecture. Mr. Orpen himself inclines to the belief that Regan supplied the unknown trouvère with a tale already “put into metre”; but Dr. Liebermann has rightly urged the improbability of our poem being merely an adaptation of one previously composed. Indeed, that eminent scholar has advanced a theory of his own, namely, that the real original source was a “lost chronicle” about the conquest of Ireland which Giraldus Cambrensis had used in 1188 for his Expugnatio.’ And this theory he bases on some striking parallel passages.[342] To the few typical parallels adduced by Dr. Liebermann I would myself add some taken from the stirring tale of the saving of Dublin when, mad for revenge, the ousted Northmen assembled from all the isles of the north to regain their lost dominion. This sudden upleaping, for a moment, of the old wiking flame was but a splendid anachronism: like the Highland rising of the ‘forty-five,’ it was curiously out of date. Yet the old Scandinavian spirit, if dulled among the traders of Dublin, still burnt in the hardy rovers they had now summoned to their aid; and the Irish chieftain who stood aloof watching with his men the surging fray as the little band of Anglo-Normans strove to repel the onslaught, saw not merely rival conquerors, quarrelling, like vultures, for the spoil, but deadly foes whose own lives hung on the issue of that fight. But while in a fit of ‘berserker’ fury, ‘John the Mad’ led the attack against the eastern gate, Richard de Cogan, the governor’s brother, had privily sallied from another one:—

Then, marching round till he reached the rear of the assailants, he fell on them suddenly with a mighty shout, and the Northmen, caught between his brother and himself, wavered at last in their attack. The Danish axe still whirled in the hands of ‘John the Mad,’ cleaving its way, as of old, through helm and coat of mail:

But John himself fell at last; and the sons of the wikings fled to their ships. Hasculf, their king, captured alive, hurled at his captors words of scorn, and was by them promptly beheaded, “pur son orgoil e ses fous dis,” or, as Giraldus tersely puts it, “insolenti verbo.”

If Dr. Liebermann’s theory be accepted, it would involve, as he reminds us, the important consequence that we have in our poem and the ‘Expugnatio’ not two independent authorities, but narratives drawn from a common source. The discrepancies, however, between the two are so numerous and so significant that we cannot accept this new view as at all satisfactorily proved.

But turning to a third source of information, known as “the Book of Howth,” I have no hesitation in saying that its nature has been quite misunderstood. It is difficult to render clear, within a short compass, the hopeless confusion that surrounds the subject, and that is, virtually, all to be traced to an error of that ardent collector, but most untrustworthy antiquary, Sir George Carew, whose voluminous MSS. at Lambeth include both the ‘Regan’ poem and the Book of Howth, and to whom we should have felt more grateful if he would only have left them alone. But the worst offender was Professor Brewer, whose work it is the fashion to rate very highly indeed, though I have found it by no means unimpeachable even in his calendars of the state papers of Henry VIII.[343] Now the Professor ought to have been quite at home on this Irish subject, for it fell to his lot to edit the first four volumes of Giraldus as well as the Book of Howth; yet he not only stereotyped and carried further Carew’s original error, but found fault, somewhat unjustly, with Mr. Dimock’s remarks in his preface to the ‘Expugnatio.’

The real facts of the case are these. So popular were the works of ‘Master Gerald,’ as Mr. Dimock observed, that they survive, not only in many MSS., but in several early translations. The pedigree of these translations has not been properly worked out. At Trinity College, Dublin, we have two in E. 3, 31, and F. 4, 4, while at Lambeth we have the so-called ‘Conquest of Ireland’ by Bray—published by Messrs. Brewer and Bullen, with the Book of Howth—and in the latter (pp. 36–117) there is included another and more modernized version. Of these the one assigned to Bray was held by Professor Brewer to have been written about the end of the 14th or beginning of the 15th century, and to be “so interesting and curious a specimen of English as spoken in the Pale” that he decided to print it in full and to retain the original orthography. But E. 3, 31 was, he admitted, “a still earlier version.” Yet this latter MS., when submitted by Mr. Dimock to so competent an authority as Mr. Earle, was pronounced by him to be “a truly interesting specimen of fifteenth (sic) century Hibernian English.” He added that it well deserved publication, in which remark I certainly concur, its language being most curious. Professor Brewer (p. xxiii.) declared it “an error” of Mr. Dimock and others to term this MS. a translation of Giraldus, but the real error, we shall find, was his own. The other Dublin MS. (F. 4, 4), to which he does not allude, is assigned by Mr. Dimock to “the sixteenth century” (p. lxxvii.), and declared to be “a transcript from the earlier E. 3, 31,” a description which, unfortunately, misses the point. The solution, I believe, of the whole mystery is that there was a very early and exceedingly free translation of Gerald’s ‘Expugnatio,’ which, after the mediæval fashion, spoke of him at times in the third person, and thus assumed, in places, a quasi-original form. This original translation, which seems to be now lost, was copied both by the writer of E. 3, 31 and by Bray in his ‘Conquest of Ireland,’ the latter only modernizing somewhat the language. Then come the two other MSS., both of the latter part of the 16th century. Of these the distinctive feature is that while still copying, though further modernizing, the original translation—for internal evidence seems to prove that the Book of Howth at least was derived from neither of the above copies—they interlard it with certain passages taken from another and distinct source. This discovery, which corrects Mr. Dimock and overthrows the conclusions of Professor Brewer, is based on collation of the essential passage in the Book of Howth with its parallel passage in the Dublin MS. F. 4, 4 as given in Hardy’s ‘Catalogue of Manuscripts relating to the History of Great Britain,’ on the authority of Mr. W. M. Hennessy:

Nothing can be more clear than this reference to the interlarded portions, which can all, I may add, be identified and separated from the ‘Giraldus’ portion. But Carew carelessly wrote, in the margin on fo. 6, that the whole narrative “was translated out of an old book of O’Neale’s written in Latin, and put into English by Dowdall, Primate of Ardmaghe, beginning in anno 1167.” Though Professor Brewer had the words of the original before him, and though he could not but admit that Bray “follows closely the footsteps of Giraldus,” yet he was so misled by Carew’s unlucky slip as to assert that the MS. E. 3, 31 was “nothing more than a translation of the Latin chronicle once in O’Neil’s possession, which Carew calls ‘the Conquest of Ireland, written by Thomas Bray’” (p. xxiii.). These, on the contrary, are precisely the versions which have no interpolations from that source. The Armagh book was devoted to the deeds of John de Courcy, Conqueror of Ulster, though, by a crowning error, Professor Brewer was careful to distinguish it from “A Chronicle of the Gests or Doings of John de Courcey, Earl of Ulster.” Apart from the interest of its contents, the “book” has a special importance from a significant allusion by Giraldus, when closing his chapter on John, who was never, by the way, “Earl of Ulster”:

Having now cleared up all this confusion, I need not dwell on Professor Brewer’s further failure to detect the share taken by Christopher lord of Howth in the compilation of the book that bears the name of his house, but will resume our discussion of the Anglo-Norman poem.

Although, as I have said, the nature of the materials supplied to this 13th century trouvère must remain as yet conjectural, the question is of some literary interest in its bearing on the relation of the ‘Carmen Ambrosii’ to the ‘Itinerarium Peregrinorum,’ if not to the chronicle of Richard of Devizes, in which cases, by a converse process, we find a French poem utilized by a Latin chronicler. It is the plausible suggestion of M. Paul Meyer that the trouvère to whom we owe this poem composed it by desire of the countess of Pembroke, daughter of the earl, and granddaughter of Dermot, just as the great ‘Marshal’ poem, now in course of publication, was written for the glorification of her husband’s family.[344] That the writer was a Pembrokeshire man is rendered extremely probable by his evidently close acquaintance with that district, and his recognition of the Flemish element in ‘little England beyond Wales.’ A curious test of his accuracy is afforded by his mention of the king’s departure for Ireland:

It is a warning to the critical school of historians that Miss Norgate very naturally supposed the poet to have here mistaken Crook, in Waterford harbour, where Henry disembarked, for the place where he took ship. Mr. Orpen has shown conclusively, from records, that the ‘croix’ was the usual place of embarkation for those leaving Pembroke for Ireland. We have thus a peculiar feature of the poem in its combination of the Irish knowledge possessed by the original informant with the acquaintance of its later versifier with men and places in that district from which the adventurers had so largely come.

Among the points on which this poem gives us special information we may note its mention of a man who played no small part in the royal administration of Ireland.[345] We read that, on the coming of king Henry,—

Belonging to the same type as the men whom the first Henry had steadily raised to office and to power as a check upon the turbulent feudal nobility, William was called upon to play a similar part in Ireland as the representative of the royal power among the eager adventurers who had flocked to the land of promise. Hence their bitter complaints against his rule to the king, and the violent criticism of his personal character to which Giraldus gave utterance from the point of view of his kinsmen. Now Professor Tout rejects the statement, in the two lines we have quoted, that William came with the king, and infers from the ‘Gesta’ that Henry had despatched him some time before from Normandy to govern till he came. But there is evidence—though unknown, it would seem, to historians—that throws fresh light upon the question. Mr. Eyton, in his ‘Court and Itinerary’ of the king, could not discover any document belonging to his stay at Pembroke (29th September to 16th October), while waiting to cross to Ireland. It was there, however, on the 7th of October (as the date is, in this case, given) that he granted a charter to the men of Maldon,[346] from which we learn that with him at the time were the earls of Cornwall and Clare (Hertford), Roger Bigod, three of his ‘dapiferi,’ or household officers, William Ruffus, Alvred de St. Martin, and William Fitz Audelin, with two men, Hugh de Gundeville and Robert Fitz Bernard, whom he took with him to Ireland and left there. It is clear then that if William Fitz Audelin and Robert Fitz Bernard met him on landing at Waterford, they can only have preceded him, at most, by a few days. This discovery vindicates the virtual accuracy of the poem.

Mr. Eyton’s work, to which I have referred, records (p. 165) another charter of interest for its date. It belongs to Henry’s stay at Wexford, in March, 1172, on his way back to England. As only the first two witnesses were known to Mr. Eyton, a full list may here be appended as illustrating the king’s entourage on this expedition.

Turning now to other subjects, one of the most curious allusions in this poem is that which refers to the practice of tendering a folded glove as a gage for waging one’s law. Maurice de Prendergast is accused of treason in protecting the king of Ossory from the perfidy of his foes:

So, too, when Robert Fitz Stephen was brought as a traitor before king Henry:

Mr. Orpen aptly quotes the case of the dying Roland, when ‘por ses pechiez Dieu porofrit lo guant,’ and refers us to ‘vadium in duello,’ and ‘plicare vadia’ in Du Cange. But the most instructive remarks on this custom will be found in Professor Maitland’s introduction to precedents for the Court Baron.[349] The formula he finds for this antique wager runs thus: “He shall wage his law with his folded glove (de sun guant plyee) and shall deliver it into the hand of the other, and then take his glove back and find pledge for his law.” The learned, writer explains that the folded glove typified that chattel of value which “in very old times” was the vadium, wed, or gage constituting the contract, and that this was now supplanted by a contract with sureties, who had become the real security for the party’s appearance in court. This procedure, it will be seen, is brought out in our poem, which was written about a century earlier than the treatise Mr. Maitland quotes. The mention here, I may add, of “his peers,” and the phrase, as Mr. Orpen points out, ‘Li reis receut le cors’ (l. 2635) suggest surely that the writer of the poem had a special knowledge of legal formulas.

The careful reader will detect also a constitutional hint in the summons to the tenants by knight service to come to the assistance of king Henry in the rebellion of 1173:

For we see here an allusion to that special summons, to which, whether for council or for war, each ‘baron’ was entitled. One of the grievances of Becket, it may be remembered, at Northampton was that he had not been summoned ‘par sei,’ but only through the sheriff. Perhaps, however, the most important contribution made by this poem to institutional history is found in that most important passage, ll. 3064–3177, which the editor describes as “a sort of original Domesday Book of the first Anglo-Norman settlement,” and as presenting all the appearance of being, in substance, a contemporary account. For, apart from its obvious value as “the only connected account of the subinfeudation of Leinster and Meath by earl Richard Fitz Gilbert and Hugh de Laci, respectively,” it affords a very striking confirmation of the new theory on knight service advanced by me in the pages of the ‘English Historical Review,’ in which, as against the accepted view maintained by Dr. Stubbs and Mr. Freeman, I contended that the quota of knight service was determined not by the area of the fief, but by “the unit of the feudal host,” and is therefore reckoned in round numbers, and is almost invariably a multiple of 5, if not of 10.[350] I proved this to be the case for England, and appealed to the Irish evidence as confirming the discovery. But I did not quote this remarkable passage, from which we learn that in Meath—which Henry had granted to Hugh de Lacy for the service of fifty knights (l. 2730)—Richard Fleming was enfeoffed to serve with twenty knights, and Gilbert de Nugent (as we learn from charter evidence) with five; while in Leinster, which the Earl, as we learn from charters, held by the service of a hundred knights, Maurice de Prendergast received his fief “pur dis [10] chevalers servise,” Walter de Riddlesford was bound to furnish twenty knights, and a certain Reginald was assigned fifteen as his quota. Our confidence in the poem is increased by the fact that it names fifty knights as the service due from Meath, which we know to be correct, while so good an authority as the ‘Gesta’ makes it a hundred. The whole of this curious passage is ably annotated by Mr. Orpen, and the puzzling place-names identified. But, familiar though he clearly is with almost every source of information, he would seem to be unacquainted with the valuable Gormanston Register, which contains, I believe, a transcript (fo. 190 a) of the actual charter by which earl Richard granted to Maurice Fitz Gerald Naas and Wicklow (ll. 3085–92)—the former for the service of five knights.[351] The same Register has copies of three charters (fos. 5b, 188b), showing how the lands spoken of in the poem as granted to Gilbert de Nangle came, under Richard I., to Walter de Lacy, who granted them in turn to his brother Hugh.

The comparative ease and rapidity with which a handful of adventurers had parcelled out among themselves the most fertile portions of the island is perhaps the most surprising feature of the whole story. It is certain that the native Irish were by no means wanting in courage; indeed, they were then, as they always have been, only too ready to fight. Their weapons were good and were skilfully wielded; but like the wild Celts of Galloway, who had hurled themselves in vain, at the Battle of the Standard, against a line of mailed warriors, they scorned the use of defensive armour. Their mode of warfare was essentially suited to woods and bogs and passes, while their assailants were accustomed, from continental warfare, to cavalry actions in the open. Combining the evidence of our poem with that of Master Gerald, we can see clearly that, as in so many decisive encounters, from Hastings itself to Culloden, the issue turned on the conflict of wholly differing tactics. Precisely as at Hastings, the Normans—now the Anglo-Normans—enjoyed the enormous advantage derived from the use of the bow. Giraldus, whatever his defects, was a shrewd and sound observer; and he tells us of the demoralizing effect on the natives, in the early days of the conquest, of the arrows against which they had no means of defence. Careful investigation shows that each band of the invaders landed with a force of knights and archers, the latter being usually found in the proportion of ten to one. In the combined action of these two arms, as at the great battle which had decided the fate of England, the Normans excelled. “In Hibernis conflictibus,” wrote Gerald, “hoc summopere curandum, ut semper arcarii militibus turmis mixtim adjiciantur.” As Harold had discovered, before the Conquest, how unsuitable was a force composed of heavily-armed English infantry for pursuit of the nimble Welsh, as Richard was shortly to find his host of mailed knights and men-at-arms harassed to death by the swift movements of the light Saracen cavalry, so, writes Gerald, the Irish could only be successfully attacked by troops able to pursue them among their mountain fastnesses. Nor are his criticisms less true for being animated, as they evidently are, by the scorn of his gallant relatives, as the pioneers of the conquest, for those later comers who despised their experience, and on whom they looked in their fierce warfare, as a rough colonist of the present day would look on a pipeclayed guardsman.

The very first battle in which the invaders took part proved that the Irish could not hope to stand against them in the open. Forcing their way with Dermot into Ossory, through the woods and bogs, they found themselves deserted at a critical moment by almost all their native allies, who lost heart suddenly and fled. Maurice de Prendergast, one of their leaders, saw that the little English band was likely to be “rushed” by the natives, with whom the woods were swarming (“Que els lur curusent sure”). In accordance with the old Norman tactics, he detached his archers to form an ambush, and then spurred for the open field: the natives followed in hot pursuit, and their wily foes, reaching ground on which cavalry could act, turned and rode them down. The archers in their rear completed their discomfiture, like the English sharpshooters at Poitiers, and the native “friendlies,” with their beloved axes, were soon spread over the field, pleasantly engaged in decapitating the corpses of their fellow-countrymen. I see no reason to doubt the tale of king Dermot gloating over the heads that his followers brought and piled before him, and leaping for joy as with a loud voice he rendered thanks to his Creator on detecting among them the face of a specially hated foe. It may have been the thought of his own son, blinded by his kingly rival, that made him, we read, clutch the head and gnaw the features with his teeth. Such a ‘deviation from humanity’ (to quote a famous phrase) will not seem incredible to those who have seen his countrymen, centuries later in the history of civilization, burn alive a woman as a witch,[352] deliberately mutilate defenceless men, or dance in the very blood of the murdered Lord Mountmorres.

In all this internecine conflict the only motive that can clearly be traced is the passionate desire for vengeance. To glut that desire Dermot was ready, not only to call in the alien against his fellow-countrymen, but even to promise ‘Strongbow’ the succession to Leinster and his followers landed possessions, which he could only do at the cost of enraging his own kinsmen and subjects. Giraldus, indeed, is at pains to justify the position of the English in Ireland, and to claim that it was virtually brought about by consent rather than by conquest. Here again we may best picture to ourselves the situation by comparing the treaties or concessions wrung from barbarous potentates by the adventurous Englishmen of to-day. Dermot had notoriously promised what was not his to give, without the least consideration for the rights or interest of his people. But just as, at the conquest of England itself, Norman casuistry had enabled William to claim the succession by gift of his kinsman, and to forfeit as traitors all those who opposed that claim, and just as his followers, by Norman law, though standing in the shoes of English thegns, assumed the position of feudal lords, so, in Ireland, the new settlers looked at things from a feudal standpoint, and so originated that conflict of irreconcilable polities which has practically continued without intermission ever since. In the end indeed, especially outside of Meath and Leinster, they adapted themselves, as is well known, to the native system of government, and became, in the eyes of the English, more or less Irish chieftains. But at first the necessities of the case accentuated their alien status. For on the one hand the weakness of the royal power, and on the other the danger of their position, conspired to give their settlement an intensely feudal character. Our poem, as we have said, shows us the lords of Meath and Leinster, respectively, enfeoffing their followers to hold of them by knight service, and these became, it should be noticed, the “barons” of Meath or of Leinster, a term which in England was only found in the border palatinates of Chester and of Durham. These barons were encouraged to construct castles at once as the best defence against those sudden raids in which the Irish were wont to indulge. In accordance with the policy of the Romans in their day, and with our own at the present time, when extending the borders of the Empire, the shrewd Gerald strongly urged that the country should be opened up by constructing roads through its wilds, and then held by fortified posts, or, as he expressed it, by castles. Writing within twenty years of earl Richard’s landing, he had already to lament that the Irish had learnt from their foes the use of the bow, and had so greatly improved their tactics that the easy victories of the early invaders were no longer possible: by castles alone could their successors hope to hold the land.

In the conquest of Ulster we have, perhaps, the most striking exploit of the whole invasion. Accomplished by individual, and indeed unauthorized, enterprise, it was not complicated, as in the south, by native co-operation or royal interference, but was carried through by the reckless daring of a single adventurer and his band. With two and twenty knights and some three hundred followers, John de Courci set forth from Dublin, about the close of January, 1177, to conquer the kingdom of Ulster. Eager for plunder and the joys of the foray, there had flocked to his standard those adventurous spirits who chafed beneath the strict rule of the governor, William Fitz Audelin. In the depth of winter they hurried forth, and reaching Down by forced marches on the fourth day from leaving Dublin, were enabled to seize it by a coup de main. Masters thus of the capital of the land, they had also secured a maritime base invaluable for their further operations. The Irish, stunned by the suddenness of the blow, had fled, carrying their king with them, and the adventurers were soon revelling in the plunder they had sought. In vain the natives, rallying from their flight, endeavoured to recapture their lost stronghold. Like the garrison of Dublin when beset by Roderick O’Conor and his host, John and his handful of followers sallied forth upon their foes. Giraldus shows us their leader as he lived, towering in height above his fellows, a man of war from his youth up, whose only fault was the martial ardour that led him, when the battle raged, to forget the general in the soldier, as he charged headlong on his foes. Mounted on his famous white war horse, he now performed, as usual, Homeric deeds of valour, lopping off the heads and limbs of his enemies with a sweep of his tremendous sword. The Irish, though beaten at length, attacked him again in the summer, only to experience again defeat at his hand. But so desperate was the struggle for the land that in one of his battles he was left with only eleven knights. With their horses slain, and without food, the little band fought their way, for thirty miles, through their foes, and made good their escape. By sheer hard fighting ‘Ulvestere’—now Down and Antrim—was at length virtually subdued and then ‘castled’ by John. In time there rose on every side those strongholds of which the crumbling ruins long bore witness to the harassed lives of the alien lords of the land. Dreading the perils of the cloud-swept glens, and creeping from rock to rock within sound of that troubled sea, the “Barons of Ulster,” in their eyries, perched on the basalt crags, wrought about the land a belt of conquest of which we have the noblest relic in the wild glory of Dunluce. Their heirs still lingered on, four centuries later, clinging “in great poverty and peril” to the lands their ancestors had won. The Savages, the Jordans, the Russells could still be recognised by their names, but we read of the “Fitzurses, now degenerate, and called in Irish McMaghon, the Bear’s son.”[353]

Like the proud lords of Leinster and of Meath, John de Courci had his feudal officers, his “constable” and “marshal,” his “seneschal” and his “chamberlain.” Ulster, in fact, had duly become a typical feudal principality. Essentially obnoxious as such a development must have been in the eyes of the English Crown, its weakness in Ireland compelled it to temporize, nor could it find any better way of checking this growth of feudal power than by playing off, in Ulster, the Lacys against De Courci, just as it played them off against the Fitzgeralds in the south. Thus was initiated that policy of see-saw which, in practice, has always been, and is still, pursued. A striking passage on the subject in the quaint Book of Howth is not inapplicable at the present time, when the prospect of that steady government which Ireland so badly needs seems as distant as ever.[354]

‘Divide et impera’ was the policy adopted, and the spirit of faction which the nobles seem to have imbibed from their Irish neighbours was thus encouraged by the Crown. This system may be said to have lasted down to the days of Elizabeth, to be succeeded, in the 17th century, by the new rivalry of Catholic and Protestant, Cavalier and Roundhead. But still the island was allowed to become the battle ground of parties, favoured now, in turn,, by England, according to the government in power at the time. But never, perhaps, has this unfortunate system been more recklessly or disastrously pursued than since Mr. Gladstone’s bid for the votes of the ‘Nationalist’ party.

Although Giraldus has been bitterly assailed for criticising with no sparing hand the undoubted failings of the Irish, he showed, we think, on the contrary, far more fairness than might reasonably be expected from a writer in his position. But he did far more than this. It might indeed be truly said of him ‘Rem acu tetigit’: he boldly gave the reasons why the conquest of Ireland was a failure, and added frank and shrewd advice as to its government in the future. Even as we have been often told that Cromwell would have settled the Irish question, had only his ‘thorough’ policy been relentlessly pursued, so Giraldus justly reminds us that the first flood of conquest was checked by Henry II., when the work was only half done, and that Henry himself, in like manner, only put his hand to the plough to turn back at once and leave the work to others. Those others, again, were commissioned only to be recalled: the strong centralized administration that was shaping the English realm was never organized in Ireland; the Crown harassed, but it did not govern. The four prophets of Ireland, he wrote, had duly foretold that the island would not be mastered by the English till the eve of the day of judgment. If he accused the Irish of shiftiness and treachery, as the failings that accompanied their natural quickness, he sternly rebuked his own countrymen for despoiling their native allies of their lands, and wantonly insulting the native chieftains when they came to pay their respects to John as lord of Ireland. He even charges them with being corrupted by their intercourse with the natives into sometimes imitating their treachery. That this charge was not without foundation we learn from the French poem, which gives a spirited description of the action of Maurice de Prendergast—one of its heroes—when he brought his ally the king of Ossory to the English camp, having pledged his word for his safety. The king of Munster urged that his rival should be treacherously seized, “E li baruns, san mentir, le voleient tuz consentir.” But Maurice, indignantly denouncing their contemplated breach of faith, swore by his sword that he would cleave the head of the first man who should dare to lay a hand upon the king.

It is chiefly, I think, because his evidence is fatal to the idle dream of an Irish golden age that the evidence of Giraldus on the state of the country has been so bitterly assailed. For my part, I believe his statement as to the corruption in church matters to be entirely honest, and deem them in accordance with what we know from other sources. In his curious sketch of the lay ‘ecclesiastics,’ with their long flowing hair, and with nothing clerical about them but the absence of weapons, he touches one of the worst abuses from which the church suffered in Ireland. The very see of Armagh itself had been held for at least two centuries in hereditary succession by lay chieftains, and the practice had spread widely to the degradation of the church. For half a century, indeed, before the coming of the invaders, efforts had been made at church reform; but the initiative had come from England and from Rome, and little encouragement was given by the native rulers themselves. Nor will those who are acquainted with Irish society in the past reject as improbable the statement of Giraldus that the clergy, though greatly distinguished by their chastity and fervent devotion to divine service, were apt to spend their evenings in drinking somewhat deeply. But even to this he is careful to add, there were found honourable exceptions. The important fact to be remembered is that, if Ireland had once been a centre of Christianity, a bright star in a heathen age, its church had deteriorated, not advanced, amidst the ceaseless and murderous strife of native rule.

To say that the Anglo-Norman settlement, with its conquest, or rather half conquest, of the country, proved a blessing to Ireland, is a proposition that no one, probably, would care to maintain. Why this should have been so is one of those fascinating problems that must ever arouse the speculation and stir the interest of the student. The far earlier Scandinavian settlements in Normandy and in Eastern England have little in common with the exploits of Strongbow’s daring band. Sicily in every way affords a closer parallel. Nearer in time to the events we have discussed, its conquest, also, was no less essentially a private enterprise. What the sons of Tancred had accomplished in the south, the children of Nesta well might hope to bring to pass in the west. Indeed the adventurers of the 11th century had faced a task, to all seeming, harder than that which confronted the adventurers of the 12th. Some might hold that the Norman race was no longer in its prime, that its great conquering and governing powers were already impaired. That its enterprise was less ardent, that in England it was settling down, is, no doubt, the case: from the turbulent regions of Wales adventurers were still forthcoming, but the pioneers of Irish conquest were not supported by that inflow from England which was needed for so great an undertaking, and which, in earlier days, would probably have hastened to their support. But this was only one among the causes of the great Irish failure. Sicily, like England, fortunate in its kings, was fortunate also in that position of isolation which enabled its Norman conquerors to work out their own destiny. If only Ireland had enjoyed the same geographical advantage, if it had been far enough distant from England, its invaders might, in the same fashion, have established a dynasty of their own, and have quickly accommodated themselves, with the marvellous adaptability of their race, to those native ways to which indeed many of them did, ultimately, so strangely conform. It is now recognised that the kings of England did not, and could not, become true English kings till the loss of their Norman possessions drove them to find in England their true home and country. Giraldus was right when he urged that his friends should have been let alone, or the royal power, if brought into play, exercised in full force. One can, indeed, imagine what might have been the fate of England, if, half conquered by adventurous bands of Normans, she had then been half governed, from abroad, by a Norman duke.

Deeper still, however, lay the root of the trouble. The Normans had found England a kingdom ready made, its people accustomed to governance and recognising the reign of law. Coming of a kindred stock, and possessing kindred institutions, the English had only to receive the addition of a feudal system for which their own development had already made them ripe. In Ireland, on the contrary, the new comers found no kindred system. Its tribal polity had placed between its people and themselves a gulf impassable because dividing two wholly different stages of civilization. With no common foundation on which to build, they could only hope to become Irish by cutting themselves off from their own people. If, on the other hand, they wished to substitute law and order for native anarchy, there was no indigenous machinery for the purpose such as the Norman kings had found and used in England: they had no alternative but to introduce the system they had brought with them, a system absolutely irreconcilable with all native ideas of land tenure. Whether Ireland, if left to herself, would even yet have emerged from the tribal stage of society becomes doubtful when we contemplate the persistence of the mores Hibernici. A comparison of the changes in our own people between the 12th century and the days of Queen Victoria—or even of Queen Elizabeth—and those discernible in the Irish people suggests relative stagnation. It clings to its ways as the peasant clings to that patch of soil which he will not leave, and on which he can exist only in squalor and in want.[355] Of one thing at least we may be sure. No fonder dream has enthralled a people’s imagination than that of an Irish golden age destroyed by ruthless invaders. The first invaders who entered Ireland did so by the invitation of one of her own sons; and they found it, as an Irishman has said, “a vast human shambles.”