struggle.  That its condition was miserable, almost beyond conception, is all that we know for certain.  In England, although civil war was raging, and the baronage were energetically slaughtering one another, the mass of the people seem for the most part to have gone unscathed.  The townsfolk were undisturbed; the law was protected; the law officers went their rounds; there seems even to have been little general rapine and pillage.  The Church, still at its full strength, watched jealously over its own rights and over the rights of those whom it protected.  In Ireland, although there was nothing that approached to the dignity of civil war, the condition of the country seems to have been one of uninterrupted and almost universal carnage, pillage, and rapine.  The baronage of the Pale raided upon the rest of the country, and the rest of the country raided upon the Pale.  Even amongst churchmen it was much the same.  Although there was no religious dissension, and heresy was unknown, the jealousy between the churchmen of the two rival races, seems to have been as deep as between the laymen, and their hatred of one another probably even greater.  As has been seen in a former chapter, no priest or monk of Irish blood was ever admitted into an English living or monastery, and the rule appears to have been quite equally applicable the other way.

The means, too, for keeping these discordant elements in check were ludicrously inefficient.  The whole military establishment during the greater part of this century consisted of some 80 archers, and about 40 “spears;” the whole revenue amounted to a few hundred pounds per annum.  The Parliament was a small and irregular body of barons and knights of the shires, with a few burgesses, unwillingly summoned from the towns, and a certain number of bishops and abbots, the latter, owing to the disturbed state of the country, being generally represented by their proctors.  It was summoned at long intervals, and met sometimes in Dublin, sometimes in Drogheda, at other times in Kilkenny, as occasion suggested.  Even when it did meet legislation was rarely attempted, and its office was confined mainly to the voting of subsidies.  The country simply drifted at its own pleasure down the road to ruin, and by the time the battle of Bosworth was fought, the deepest depths of anarchy had probably been sounded.

The seaport towns alone kept up some little semblance of order and self-government, and seem to have shown some slight capacity for self-defence.  In 1412, Waterford distinguished itself by the spirited defence of its walls against the O’Driscolls, a piratical clan of West Cork, and the following year sent a ship into the enemy’s stronghold of Baltimore, whose crew seized upon the chief himself, his three brothers, his son, his uncle, and his wife, and carried them off in triumph to Waterford, a feat which the annals of the town commemorate with laudable pride.  Dublin, too, showed a similar spirit, and fitted out some small vessels which it sent on a marauding expedition to Scotland, in reward for which its chief magistrate, who had up to that time been a Provost, was invested with the title of Mayor.  “The king granted them license,” says Camden, “to choose every year a Mayor and two baliffs.”  Also that its Mayor “should have a gilt sword carried before him for ever.”