All these peculiarities, which for ages continued to mark the struggle between the two races now brought face to face in a death struggle, are just as marked and just as strikingly conspicuous in the first twenty years which followed the invasion as they are during the succeeding half-dozen centuries.

[Illustration:  FIGURES ON KILCARN FONT, MEATH.]

XIII.

JOHN IN IRELAND.

Henry had gone, and the best hopes of the new dependency departed with him never to return again.  Fourteen years later he despatched his son John, then a youth of nineteen, with a train of courtiers, and amongst them our friend Giraldus, who appeared to have been sent over in some sort of tutorial or secretarial capacity.

The expedition was a disastrous failure.  The chiefs flocked to Waterford to do honour to their king’s son.  The courtiers, encouraged by their insolent young master, scoffed at the dress, and mockingly plucked the long beards of the tributaries.  Furious and smarting under the insult they withdrew, hostile every man of them now to the death.  The news spread; the more distant and important of the chieftains declined to appear.  John and his courtiers gave themselves up to rioting and misconduct of various kinds.  All hopes of conciliation were at an end.  A successful confederation was formed amongst the Irish, and the English were for a while driven bodily out of Munster.  John returned to England at the end of eight months, recalled in hot haste and high displeasure by his father.

Twenty-five years later he came back again, this time as king, with a motley army of mercenaries gathered to crush the two brothers De Lacy, who for the moment dominated all Ireland—­the one, Hugo, being Earl of Ulster, and Viceroy; the other, Walter, Lord of the Palatinate of Meath.

Among his many vices John had not at least that of indolence to be laid to his charge!  He marched direct from Waterford to Trim, the head-quarters of the De Lacys, seized the castle, moved on next day to Kells, thence proceeded by rapid stages to Dundalk, Carlingford, Downpatrick, and Carrickfergus.  Hugo de Lacy fled in dismay to Scotland.  The chieftains of Connaught and Thomond joined their forces with those of the king; even the hitherto indomitable O’Neil made a proffer of submission.  Leaving a garrison at Carrickfergus, John marched back by Downpatrick and Drogheda, re entered Meath, visited Duleck, slept a night at Kells, and so back to Dublin, where he was met by nearly every Anglo-Norman baron, each and all eager to exhibit their own loyalty.  His next care was to divide their territory into counties; to bind them over to supply soldiers when called upon to do so by the viceroy, and to arrange for the muster of troops in Dublin.  Then away he went again to England.  He had been in the country exactly sixty-six days.