Conspicuous amongst this band of knights and adventurers was one who was himself no knight, but a priest and the self-appointed chronicler of the rest, Gerald de Barri—­better known as Gerald of Wales, or Giraldus Cambrensis, who was the grandson of Nesta, through her daughter Angareta.

Giraldus is one of those writers whom, to tell the truth, we like a great deal better than they deserve.  He is prejudiced to the point of perversity, and gullible almost to sublimity, uncritical even for an eminently uncritical age, accepting and retailing any and every monstrous invention, the more readily apparently in proportion to its monstrosity.  For all that—­despite his prejudices, despite even his often deliberate perversion of the truth, it is difficult to avoid a certain kindliness for him.  To the literary student he is indeed a captivating figure.  With his half-Welsh, half-Norman blood; with the nimble, excitable, distinctly Celtic vein constantly discernible in him; with a love of fighting which could hardly have been exceeded by the doughtiest of the knights, his cousins and brothers; with a pen that seems to fly like an arrow across the page; with a conceit which knows neither stint nor limit, he is the most entertaining, the most vividly alive of chroniclers; no historian certainly in any rigid sense of the word, but the first, as he was also unquestionably the chief and prince of war correspondents.

Whether we like him or not, we at any rate cannot dispense with him, seeing that nearly everything we know of the Ireland of the Conquest, we know from those marvellous pages of his, which, if often exasperating, are at any rate never dull.  In them, as in a mirror, we see how, when, and where the whole plan of the campaign was laid; who took part in it; what they said, did, projected; their very motives and thoughts—­the whole thing stands out fresh and alive as if it had happened yesterday.

There were no lack of motives, any of which would have been temptation enough for invasion.  To the pious it took on the alluring guise of a Crusade.  The Irish Church, which had obtained such glowing fame in its early days, had long since, as we have seen, grown into very bad repute with Rome.  Despite that halo of early sanctity, she was held to be seriously tainted with heresy.  She allowed bishops to be irregularly multiplied, and consecrated contrary to the Roman rule by one bishop only; tithes and firstfruits were not collected with any regularity; above all, the collection of Peter’s pence, being the sum of one penny due from every household, was always scandalously in arrears, nay, often no attempt was made to collect it at all.  She did many wrong things, but it may shrewdly be suspected that this was one of the very worst of them.

[Illustration:  WEST DOORWAY OF FRESHFORD CHURCH, CO.  KILKENNY. (From a Photograph.)]