This also explains what is often set down as the inexplicable want of patriotism shown by the native Irish in not combining more resolutely together against their assailants.  It is true that they did not do so, but the fact is not referred to the right cause.  An Englishman of the time of the Heptarchy had, if at all, little more patriotism, and hardly more sense of common country.  He was a Wessex man, or a Northumbrian, or a man of the North or the East Angles, rather than an Englishman.  So too in Ireland.  As a people the Irish of that day can hardly be said to have had any corporate existence.  They were O’Briens, or O’Neils, or O’Connors, or O’Flaherties, and that no doubt in their own eyes appeared to be quite nationality enough.

Unfortunately both for the country and for his own successors, Henry had no time to carry out his plans, and all that he had begun to organize fell away into disorder again after his departure.  “That inconstant sea-nymph,” says Sir John Davis, “whom the Pope had wedded to him with a ring,” remained obedient only as long as her new lord was present, and once his back was turned she reverted to her own ways again.  The crowd of Norman and Welsh adventurers who now filled the country were each and all intent upon ascertaining how much of that country they could seize upon and appropriate for themselves.  There were many gallant men amongst them, but there was not one apparently who had the faintest trace of what is meant by public spirit.  Occupied only by their own interests, and struggling solely for their own share of the spoil, they could never really hold the country, and even those parts which they did get into their hands lapsed back after a while into the old condition again.

The result was that the fighting never ended.  The new colonists built castles and lived shut up in them, ruling their own immediate retainers with an odd mixture of Brehon and Norman law.  When they issued forth they appeared clad from head to foot in steel, ravaging the country more like foreign mercenaries than peaceful settlers.  The natives, driven to bay and dispossessed of their lands, fought too, not in armour, but, like the Berserkers of old, in their shirts, with the addition at most of a rude leather helmet, more often only with their hair matted into a sort of cap on their foreheads in the fashion known as the “gibbe,” that “rascally gibbe” to which Spenser and other Elizabethan writers object so strongly.  By way of defence they now and then threw up a rude stockade of earth or stone, modifications of the primitive rath, more often they made no defence, or merely twisted a jungle of boughs along the pathways to break the advance of their more heavily armed foes.  The ideas of the two races were as dissimilar as their weapons.  The instinct of the one was to conquer a country and subdue it to their own uses; the instinct of the other was to trust to the country itself, and depend upon its natural features, its forests, morasses, and so forth for security.  The one was irresistible in attack, the other, as his conqueror soon learnt to his cost, practically invincible in defence, returning doggedly again and again, and a hundred times over to the ground from which he seemed at first to have been so easily and so effectually driven off.