We have traced the raids of the Northmen for nearly a century.  They continued for a century and a quarter longer.  Through all this time the course of the nation’s life was as we have described it:  a raid from the sea, or from one of their seaboard fortresses by the Dark Gentiles or the Fair; an assembling of the hosts of the native chieftains against them; a fierce and spirited battle against the pirates in their mail-coats and armed with great battle-axes.  Sometimes the chosen people prevailed, and sometimes the Gentiles; but in either case the heads of the slain were heaped up at the feet of the victor, many cattle were driven away as spoil, and young men and maidens were taken into captivity.  It would seem that at no time was there any union between the foreigners of one and another seaboard fortress, any more than there was unity among the tribes whom they raided and who defeated them in their turn.  It was a strife of warring units, without fusion; small groups round chosen leaders, and these merging for awhile in greater groups.  Thus the life of the times, in its warlike aspect.  Its spiritual vigor we have sufficiently shown, not less in the inspirations of the saints than in the fiery songs of the bards, called forth by battles and the death of kings.  Everywhere there was fierce force and seething energy, bringing forth fruit of piety or prowess.

The raiders slowly lost their grasp of the fortresses they had seized.  Newcomers ceased to fill their thinning ranks.  Their force was finally shattered at the battle of Clontarf, which the Annalist thus records:  “1013:  The Foreigners of the west of Europe assembled against Brian and Maelseaclain, and they took with them a thousand men with coats of mail.  A spirited, fierce, violent, vengeful and furious battle was fought between them, the likeness of which was not to be found in that time, at Cluain-tarb, the Lawn of the Bulls.  In this battle was slain Brian son of Ceinneidig, monarch of Ireland, who was the Augustus of all the west of Europe, in the eighty-eighth year of his age.”

The scene of this famous conflict is on the coast, between Dublin and the Hill of Howth.  A wide strand of boulders is laid bare by the receding tide, with green sea-grass carpeting the stones.  At the very verge of the farthest tide are two huge sand-banks, where the waves roar and rumble with a sound like the bellowing of bulls, and this tumultuous roaring is preserved in the name of the place unto this day.

XI.

The passing of the Norsemen.

A.D. 1013-1250.

There was, as we have seen, no “Danish Conquest” of Ireland, nor anything approaching a conquest.  What really happened during the ninth and tenth centuries was this:  Raiders from the shores of the Northern seas, from the Scandinavian peninsula and the Western Isles of Scotland, sailed in their long ships among the islands of the Irish coast, looking for opportunities to plunder the treasuries of the religious schools, and carrying off the gold and silver reliquaries and manuscript cases, far more valuable to these heathen seamen than the Latin or Gaelic manuscripts they contained.