. the English lords in one common sentiment, and determined them to make one general effort against this formidable enemy. On this occasion, the most distinguished English barons received new titles and new honors from the hands of the British monarch. John Fitzthomas, baron of Ophaly, was created earl of Kildare; lord Edmund Butler received the title of earl of Carrick.-An army was sent by the colony into Connaught, against Fedlim O'Connor, who laid waste the territories of a number of English barons surrounding his kingdom, ́and threatened an universal annihilation of the English name, had it not been for the battle of Athunree, in which the English put forth all their strength, and gained a most decisive victory. Fedlim O'Connor fell on the field of battle, with eight thousand of his troops. In the mean time Bruce proceeded in his destructive progress through the north, and met with no obstacle to his ambition, until he arrived at the walls of the metropolis. Here the Scottish chief met with a resistance that compelled him to march into Kildare, which he desolated with all the cruelty of a disappointed and baffled general. The fury of Bruce, and the havoc committed by his army on the property of the English colony, united those barons whom a more artful policy might have divided, and rendered tributary to his purposes. The miserably impoverished state of the country at this period, proved more formidable to Bruce than the sword of his enemies. It is related, that the famine was so dreadful, that the carcases of the dead soldiers were the only sustenance of the living. Bruce, however, after all his losses from the visitation of Providence, made a desperate effort to maintain his conquest. He met the English near Dundalk; the conflict was violent, and sustained on each side with equal bravery; but at length victory declared for the English general.Edward was slain in this desperate engagement; and thus terminated an expedition, which promised in its commence ment a speedy deliverance from the English power, and which, at the end of three years, left her an object of pity and wretchedness to surrounding nations. This The miseries of the people were greatly aggravated, at this period, (1318) by the different modes of jurisdiction that governed the native and the colonist. The calamitous effects which flowed to the governors as well as the governed, demonstrated the fatuity of such a policy. To murder an Irishman was punishable only by fine; the murder of an Englishman was a capital offence. The Englishman who plundered his neighbour was condemned to death; the Irishman who committed the same crime was often handed over to his Bréhon, or Irish judge, who had it in his power to compound with the offender; an indul gence which, it is related, seduced numbers of disorderly Englishmen to renounce their name and nation. wretched policy gave unlimited reins to the vengeance of an enemy, and exposed society to all the horrors of civil war and anarchy. The worst passions found protection in the law, and the weak and innocent fell victims to the strong and the guilty. The partial administration of justice, the corruption of the judges, the depraved state of the public mind, were evils sufficiently great to impoverish the political body; but the absurd and cruel practice of quartering the soldiers on the miserable inhabitants, and exposing them to the insatiable exactions of an unbridled soldiery, filled up the cup of Irish suffering, and presented to the eye a universal scene of anarchy, rapine and massacre. The consequence of this baneful practice was, that the English freeholders, rather than endure such perpetual torture, fled to the country of the native Irish, learned their language and their manners, and were undistinguished, in the course of time, from the native inhabitants. Among those of the English barons who imposed those arbitrary exactions on the unfortunate people, was Maurice Fitzthomas of Desmond; who, it is said, to preserve the power he had usurped, (having expelled all the English settlers from his immense estates, which were soon occupied by his Irish followers,) he became an Irish chieftain, and only acknowledged those laws which secured him undiminished or unlimited power over his tenantry. The English and Irish soon united into one mass, and became one people, united against English law, and English connection. Such was the scene which Ireland exhibited when Edward III. came to the English throne. THE HISTORY OF IRELAND. Edward III. A.D. 1327. THE miserable situation to which Ireland was reduced by the Scottish invasion, which let loose the violent and furious passions of a people unrestrained by law, and uncontrouled by a settled and impartial system of jurisprudence, would incline us to suppose that the barbarities and atrocities committed by the colonists on the natives, were rather the offspring of particular circumstances, and peculiar only to that country in which such circumstances existed, than a miniature of the universal anarchy which the British empire then exhibited. A Mr. Hume, when describing the manners of the English people in the reign of Edward II. writes thus: "The estate of an English baron was managed by his bailiffs, and cultivated by his villains. Its produce was consumed in rustic hospitality by the Baron and his officers. number of idle retainers, ready for any mischief or disorder, were maintained by him: all who lived upon his estate were absolutely at his disposal; and instead of applying to courts of justice, he usually sought redress by open force and violence. The great nobility were a kind of independent potentates, who, if they submitted to any regu lations at all, were less governed by the municipal law than by a rude species of the law of nations." • How the historian who in the impartial spirit of history gives such a description of the state of society among his own countrymen, in the reign of Edward II. can be seduced to designate the Irish as barbarians, whose manners and customs were exactly similar, can only be accounted for by that determined spirit of hostility which Mr. Hume always manifests against the Irish nation. It is not surprising that a nation like Ireland, which has been the common prey of foreign invasion, of the Danes, the English, and the Scotch, should contain within its bosom all the pernicious materials of intestine warfare and distractionthat an English party and a Scotch party should be found to fly to arms in the hour of invasion, and that a system of government which put the great mass of the people out of the protection of the law, should have generated all those miserable scenes which perpetually present themselves. " Hume, that the strong restrain the barbarous How then could it be In England, we find from Mr. arm of the sovereign could not tyranny of the English baron. expected that the feeble orders of the royal deputy should have silenced the clamours of faction, repressed the violence of the petty lord, or introduced a spirit of order or civilization into the great political body of the Irish people? Amidst the distractions which disfigured the fair face of Ireland at this melancholy æra of her depression, we are relieved in some degree by the philanthropic efforts made by a few prelates to check the vices and disorders of the community. Two archbishops laboured to establish a university in Dublin, not only for the study of theology, but that of the civil and canon law, then a fashionable part of European literature. Archbishop Bricknor distinguished himself on this occasion by the liberality of his pa tronage, and Edward III. enlarged the original endow |