and that people “used then to eat one another throughout Erin.”  “They, the Scots,” says the poet Spenser, writing centuries later, “utterly consumed and wasted whatsoever was before left unspoyled so that of all towns, castles, forts, bridges, and habitations they left not a stick standing, nor yet any people remayning, for those few which yet survived fledde from their fury further into the English Pale that now is.  Thus was all that goodly country utterly laid waste.”

Such insane destruction brought its own punishment.  The colonists began to recover from their dismay.  Ormonds, Kildares, and Desmonds bestirred themselves to collect troops.  The O’Connors, who with all their tribe had risen in arms, had been utterly defeated at Athenry, where the young king Fedlim and no less than 10,000 of his followers are said to have been left dead.  Roger Mortimer, the new viceroy, was re-organizing the government in Dublin.  The clergy, stimulated by a Papal mandate, had all now turned against the invader.  Robert Bruce had some time previously been recalled to Scotland, and Sir John de Bermingham, the victor of Athenry, pushing northward at the head of 15,000 chosen troops, met the younger Bruce at Dundalk.  The combat was hot, short, and decisive.  The Scots were defeated, Edward Bruce himself killed, and his head struck off and sent to London.  The rest hastened back to Scotland with as little delay as possible.  The Scotch invasion was over.

It was over, but its effects remained.  From one end of Ireland to the other there was disaffection, anger, revolt.  England had proved too weak or too negligent to interfere at the right time and in the right way, and although successful in the end she could not turn back the tide.  There was a general feeling of disbelief in the reality of her government.  A semi-national feeling had sprung up which temporarily united colonists and natives in a bond of self-defence.  Norman nobles and native Irish chieftains threw in their lot together.  The English yeoman class, which had begun to get established in Leinster and Munster, had been all but utterly destroyed by Edward Bruce, and the remnant now left the country in despair.  The great English lords, with the exception of Ormond and Kildare, from this out took Irish names and adopted Irish dress and fashions.  The two De Burghs, as already stated, seized upon the Connaught possessions of their cousin, and divided them, taking the one Galway and the other Mayo, and calling themselves McWilliam Eighter and McWilliam Oughter, or the Nether and the Further Burkes.  So too with nearly all the rest.  Bermingham of Athenry, in spite of his late famous victory over the Irish, did the same, calling himself McYorris; Fitzmaurice of Lixnaw became McMaurice; FitzUrse of Louth, McMahon; and so on through a whole list.