work throughout Ireland; after having bestowed jewels and food upon the mighty and the needy; after having founded churches and monasteries, for by him was repaired in Ireland every church which had been consigned to decay and neglect, and they had been neglected from times remote;—­after leaving every rule and every good moral in the churches of Ireland in general; after having been the second time in the legateship; after having been fourteen years in the primacy; and after the fifty-fourth year of his age, resigned his spirit to heaven on the second day of November, and was buried in the monastery of Saint Bernard at Claravallis in France.”

This is the same worthy under whose influence was built the great lime-kiln over against the fort of Emain, where Concobar once ruled.  Even from the scant notices which we have quoted he stands forth clear and strong, full of spiritual and moral vigor, a great man in every sense, and one in whom we divine a lovable and admirable spirit.  At that time there were four archbishoprics in Ireland, at Armagh, Cashel, Dublin and Tuam; the primacy belonging to the first, as the seat of the Damliag Mor or Great Stone Church, built by Saint Patrick himself.  A sentence in the Annals shows how the revenues were raised:  “A horse from every chieftain, a sheep from every hearth.”  A few passages like these are enough to light up whole epochs of that mediaeval time, and to show us how sympathetic, strong and pure that life was, in so many ways.

We find, meanwhile, that the tribal struggle continued as of old:  “1154:  Toirdealbac Ua Concobar brought a fleet round Ireland northwards, and plundered Tir-Conaill and Inis Eogain.  The Cinel Eogain sent to hire the fleets of the Hebrides, Arran, Cantyre and Man, and the borders of Alba in general, and they fell in with the other fleet and a naval battle was fiercely and spiritedly fought between them.  They continued the conflict from, the beginning of the day till evening, but the foreign fleet was defeated.”  This records perhaps the only lesson learned from the Norsemen, the art of naval warfare.  We may regret that the new knowledge was not turned to a more national end.

Four years later, “a wicker bridge was made by Ruaidri Ua Concobar at Athlone, for the purpose of making incursions into Meath.  There was a pacific meeting between Ruaidri Ua Concobar and Tigearnan, and they made peace, and took mutual oaths before sureties and relics.”  This is our first meeting with a king as remarkable in his way as the great archbishop his contemporary.  Ruaidri descendant of Concobar was king of Connacht, holding the land from the western ocean up to the great frontier of the river Shannon.  Eager to plunder his neighbors and bring back “a countless number of cows,” he undertook this wonderful work, a pile bridge across the river, seemingly the first of its kind to be built there, and in structure very like the famous bridge which Caesar built across the Rhine,—­or like many of the wooden bridges across the upper streams of the Danube at the present day.  We shall record a few more of this enterprising and large-minded prince’s undertakings, following the course of the years.