To come to the events themselves, as they appeared to the men who witnessed them.  We find the first record of the Northern raiders under the year 795:  “The burning of Lambay by the Gentiles.  The shrines were broken and plundered.”  This Lambay is an island of considerable extent, off the Dublin coast, some six or seven miles north of Howth.  It rises gradually from the south extremity into a purple cliff of porphyry facing the northern sea, and on the sheltered slope under the sun a little church colony with schools and dwelling-houses had been built.  Against this peaceful solitude the raiders came, burning and plundering, and when they rowed away again in their long ships towards the north, a smoldering black ruin bore testimony that they were indeed Gentiles, unblessed by Christian baptism.

Three years later the little island of St. Patrick, six miles north of Lambay, met with a like fate.  It was “burned by the Gentiles,” as the Chronicles say.  And from that time forth we hear of their long ships again and again, hovering hawk-like around the coasts of Ireland and Scotland.  In 802, and again in 806, the Scottish Iona of Colum of the Churches was raided, and the next year we find the pirates making a descent upon Inismurray, off the Sligo coast, between the summit of Knocknarea and the cliffs of Slieve League.  This last settlement of saints and scholars was founded by Molaise,—­he who had pronounced sentence of exile on Colum of the Churches, the banishment that was the beginning of grace for the northern Picts.  His oratory still remains on the island, beside the Church of the Men, the Church of the Women and the circular stone fort, which was very likely built to guard against new attacks, after this first raid.  There are holy wells and altars there also, and Inismurray, better than any other place, gives us a picture of the old scholastic life of that remote and wonderful time.

Five years later, the Northern raiders made their way further round the coast, under the shadow of the western mountains and the great cliffs of Achill; we read of “a slaughter of the people of Connemara by the Gentiles” in that year, and the year following, other battles with Gentiles are recorded in the same part of Ireland.

In 818, if we are to believe the Annalist, a singular thing happened:  “An army was led by Murcad, having the Ui-Neill of the North with him.  Concobar king of Ireland with the Ui-Neill of the South and the Leinstermen came from the South on the other hand.  When they came to one place, it happened, through a miracle of God, that they separated from each other for that time without slaughter or one of them spilling a drop of the other’s blood.”  That entry better than any other shows the restless spirit of the times.  It shows, too, that the first shock of Norse invasion had not in any sense warned the people and chieftains of Ireland of coming danger, nor had it in any degree checked the steady course of the nation’s growth through storm and strife to personal consciousness, as the stepping-stone to the wider common consciousness of the modern world.