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and other weapons," de Barri admits in a few years, "by learning caution and studying the art of ambush, by the confidence gained from frequently engaging in conflict with our troops, lastly taught by our very successes, these Irishmen, whom at first we could rout Iwith ease, became able to offer a stout resistance." This in 1185. And he adds solemnly, "a campaign in France is a very different thing from a campaign in Ireland or Wales. In the former case it is carried on in an open country, in the latter in broken country; there we have plains, here woods; there armor is held in esteem, here it is reckoned cumbersome and out of place; there victory is won by weight, here by activity." The Irish proved to be exceedingly active. The country, said de Barri, "should be thickly sown with castles and so strengthened and protected." Connacht, too hard to conquer, too poor to plunder, must pay a tribute, but Limerick must be held. "It were better, far better, at first to set up our strongholds by degrees in suitable places, and to carry out a coherent system of castle building, feeling the way, so to speak, at every step." This was the method of bringing Ireland to Christ and "engrafting virtue." At the same time a public edict "should, as among the Sicilians, forbid on pain of the severest penalty all bearing of arms."

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With the Normans, it is evident, the spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak. From the twelfth to the sixteenth century Gerald's outspoken plan interpreted the mind behind the Irish invasion as clearly as von Bissing's outspoken plan interpreted the mind behind the recent Belgian invasion. But it was one thing to talk conquest, another thing to accomplish it. A light but flexible mesh of national custom, national personality, and national will fell upon and enwrapped the struggling Normans until, in the sixteenth century, their rulers saw that this creative and spiritual essence must be destroyed in order to subdue Ireland. The lesson of the earlier period, however, is the insufficiency of their means rather than the uncertainty of their end. From the start they meant that Ireland should follow England's example—go to work submissively for the ennobled and privileged feudal Englishman.

CHAPTER IV

NORMAN INVASION TO HENRY VIII

1

ITH its language, its land system, its art and

WITH

music and literature, its church and its dynastic succession, Ireland was a nation when it came within the sphere of Norman arms. In resisting Norman arms and the lordship of England it was, for four hundred years, increasingly successful. But the price of resistance was exorbitant. Even if Ireland kept it so hot that the Normans stood from one uneasy foot to the other, changing deputy after deputy and general after general, the vitality of Ireland was enslaved to this single task of dealing with an invader.

To Gaelicize the new-comers was the involuntary instinct of the nation, which had within itself the power of all healthy organisms to turn what it consumes into the stream of its blood. But the Norman process distracted Ireland between resisting and assimilating, and did not give the Irish nation a chance.

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No sooner was a generation of Norman intruders converted into "Irish rebels," people who could live on human terms with the "Irish enemy," than there came a new batch of prelates, adventurers, broken men, ambitious youngsters, and gentlemen of the royal blood who believed they could saddle Ireland.

They could

not saddle Ireland because Ireland was a nation and a personality. But this fact was not clear even to the Irishmen of the time. Many of the chiefs contradicted their true position. They sought one modus vivendi after another, responding to the twist of circumstance. It seemed best, one year, to throw out the Norman. At another time, in different political weather, it seemed best to win him over. Whichever side of the dilemma the Irish agreed to take, if they did agree, one thing was certain, their whole natural development was being sacrificed.

"Now began," says Dr. Douglas Hyde, "that permanent war-very different, indeed, from what the Irish tribes waged among themselves-which, almost from its very commencement, thoroughly arrested Irish development, and disintegrated Irish life." The italics are Dr. Hyde's. "It is not too much to say that for three centuries after the Norman Conquest Ireland produced nothing in art, literature, or scholarship, even

faintly comparable to what she had achieved before." "For four centuries after the Anglo-Norman, or more properly the Cambro-Norman invasion, the literature of Ireland seems to have been chiefly confined to the schools of the bards, and the bards themselves seem to have continued on the rather cut-and-dry lines of tribal genealogy, religious meditations, personal eulogism, clan history, and elegies for the dead. There reigns during this period a lack of imagination and of initiative in literature; no new ground is broken, no fresh paths entered on, no new saga-stuff unearthed, no new meters discovered.

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For his part in the death of Thomas Becket, Henry II did penance. Head bowed and barefooted, he walked his humble way to the tomb. He kissed the spot where Thomas bled, he confessed to the bishops and lay flat on the ground weeping and praying; stripped to his shirt, he bent his head and shoulders while the clergy flayed him, five blows from each prelate and three from each monk. This for one victim, behind whom the church stood in grim power. But for Ireland, whose body was broken and spat upon by another group of his liegemen, he neither wept nor prayed. . . . Men amuse themselves with tears for single crimes, while they

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