Fifty years later, in 683, we hear of the Saxons for the first and almost the last time in the history of Ireland.  It is recorded that the North Saxons raided Mag Breag in the East of Meath, attacking both churches and chieftains.  They carried away many hostages and much spoil, but the captives were soon after set at liberty and sent home again, on the intercession of a remarkable man, Adamnan, the biographer of Colum of the Churches, whose success in his mission was held to be miraculous.

For more than a century after this single Saxon raid Ireland was wholly undisturbed by foreign invasion, and the work of building churches, founding schools, studying Hebrew and Greek and Latin, went on with increasing vigor and success.  An army of missionaries went forth to other lands, following in the footsteps of Colum of the Churches, and of these we shall presently speak.  The life of the church was so rich and fruitful that we are led to think of this as a period of childlike and idyllic peace.

Nothing, however, could be further from the truth.  The raids, devastations and wars between province and province, tribe and tribe, went on without a year’s interruption.  This was the normal course of the nation’s life, the natural outlet of the nation’s energy:  not less a visible sign of invisible inward power than the faith and fervor of the schools.  We shall get the truest flavor of the times by quoting again from the old Annals.  That they were recorded year by year, we have already seen; the records of frosts, great snow-storms, years of rich harvests and the like, interspersed among the fates of kings, show how faithfully the annals were kept,—­as, for example, the winter of great cold, “when all the rivers and lakes of Ireland were frozen over,” in the year after the Saxon raid.

Here again, under the year 701, is the word of a man then living:  “After Loing Seac son of Angus son of Domnall had been eight years in the sovreignty of Ireland, he was slain in the battle of Ceann by Cealleac of Lough Cime, the son of Ragallac, as Cealleac himself testifies: 

     “’For his deeds of ambition he was slain in the morning at
          Glas Cuilg;

     I wounded Loing Seac with a sword, the monarch of Ireland
          round.’”

Two years later Saint Adamnan died, after governing the Abbey of Iona for six and twenty years.  It was said of him that “He made a slave of himself to his virtues,” and his great life-work, the Latin history of Saint Colum of the Churches, founder of the Iona Abbey, to this day testifies to his high learning and wisdom.

Fourteen years later “Leinster was five times devastated by the Ui-Neill,” the descendants of Nial, and a battle was fought between the men of Connacht and Munster.  Thus the lives of saints and warriors were interwoven.  On very rare occasions the two lives of the race came into collision.  Thus, a quarrel arose between Congus the Abbot and Aed Roin king of Ulad.  Congus summoned to his aid the chief of the Ui-Neill, Aed Allan by name, in these verses: