Leaving this force to work its way through the centuries, we may turn now to the life of the times as it appeared to the men and women who lived in them, and as they themselves have recorded it.  We shall find fewer great personalities; nor should we expect this to be otherwise, if we are right in thinking that the age of struggle, with its efflorescence of great persons, had done its work, and was already giving way before the modern spirit, with its genius for the universal rather than the personal.  We shall have contests to chronicle during the following centuries, whether engendered within or forced upon us from without; but they are no longer the substance of our history.  They are only the last clouds of a departing storm; the mists before the dawn of the modern world.

The most noteworthy of these contests in the early Norman age was the invasion under Edward Bruce, brother of the Scottish king, who brought a great fleet and army to Larne, then as now the Irish port nearest to the northern kingdom.  The first sufferers by this invasion were the Normans of Heath, and we presently find these same Normans allied with Feidlimid son of Aed Ua Concobar and the Connachtmen, fighting side by side against the common foe.  This was in 1315; two years later Robert Bruce joined his brother, and it was not till 1319 that Edward Bruce finally fell at Dundalk, “and no achievement had been performed in Ireland for a long time before,” the Chronicler tells us, “from which greater benefit had accrued to the country than from this; for during the three and a half years that Edward had spent in it, a universal famine prevailed to such a degree that men were wont to devour one another.”

A ray of light is thus shed on the intellectual and moral life of the time:  “1398:  Garrett Earl of Desmond—­or Deas-muma—­a cheerful and courteous man, who excelled all the Normans and many of the Irish in the knowledge of the Irish language, poetry, history and other learning, died after the victory of peace.”  We see that the Normans are already fallen under the same influence of assimilation which had transformed the Danes two hundred years before.

A half-century later, we get a vigorous and lurid picture of the survival of the old tribal strife:  “1454:  Donell O’Donell was installed in the lordship of Tyrconnell, in opposition to Rury O’Donell.  Not long after this, Donell was treacherously taken captive and imprisoned in the castle of Inis—­an island in Lough Swilly.  As soon as Rury received tidings of this, he mustered an army thither, and proceeded to demolish the castle in which Donell was imprisoned with a few men to guard him.  Rury and his army burned the great door of the castle, and set the stairs on fire; whereupon Donell, thinking that his life would be taken as soon as the army should reach the castle,—­it being his dying request, as he thought—­that he might be loosed from his fetters, as he deemed it a disgrace to be killed while imprisoned and fettered.