VIANS IN

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in Erin. But the times of peace were ended. About

ulf's enormous abyss, where before their eyes the vanishing bounds of the earth were hidden in gloom." An old English riddle likened the shattering iceberg swinging down from Arctic waters to the terror of the pirate's war-ship-the leader on the prow as it plunged through the s

uring two hundred years their national life, their learning, their civilisation, were threatened by strangers. The social order they had built up w

m river to river and lake to lake into every tribeland, covering the country with their forts, plundering the rich men's raths of their cups and vessels and ornaments of gold, sacking the schools and monasteries and churches, and entering every great king's grave for buried treasure. Their heav

England (1013). In Ireland, on the other hand, the invincible power of the tribal system for defence barred the way of invaders. Every foot of land was defended; every tribe fought for its own soil. There could be no subjection of the Irish clans except by their extermination. A Norwegian leader, Thorgils, made one supreme effort at conquest. He fixed his capital at Armagh and set up at its shrine the worship of Thor, while his wife gave her oracles from the high altar of Clonmacnois on the Shannon, in the prophetess's cloak set with stones to the hem, the nec

shipbuilding. Norwegians and Danes fought furiously for possession of the sea-ports, now against the Irish, now against each other. No victory or defeat counted beyond the day among the shifting and multiplying fleets of new marauders that for ever swarmed round the coasts-emigrants who had flung themselves on the sea for freedom's sake to save their old laws and liberties, buccaneers seeking "the spoils of the sea," sea-kings roaming the oc

oast to the Bay of Biscay. The new-made empire of Charles the Great was opening Europe once more to a settled life and the possibilities of traffic, and the Danish merchants seized the beginnings of the new trade. Ireland lay in the very centre of their seaways, with its harbours, its wealth, and its traditional commerce with France. Merchants made settlements along the coasts, and planted colonies over the inland country to supply the trade of the ports. They ha

osely connected with the Danish kingdom of Northumbria, which had its capital at York, and formed the common meeting-ground, the link which united the Northmen of Scandinavia and the Northmen of Ireland. A mighty confederation grew up. Members of the same house were kings in Dublin, in Man, and in York. The Irish Channel swarmed with their fleets. The sea was the common highway which linked th

in Limerick and the Hebrides, and their fleets took the way of the wide ocean; while Norse settlements scattered over Limerick, Kerry and Tipperary, organise

ere used, and traded in their own ports for treasures from oversea, silken raiment and abundance of wine. We read in 900 of Irishmen along t

gallant war. Murtagh, king of Ailech or Tirconnell, smote the Danes at Carlingford and Louth in 926, a year of great danger, and so came victorious to the assembly at Telltown. Again, in 933, he defeated the "foreigners" in the north, and they left two hundred and forty heads, and all their wealth of spoils. In 941 he won his famous name, "Murtagh of the Leather Cloaks," from the first midwinter campaign ever known in Ireland, "the hosting of the frost," when he led his army from Donegal, under shelter of leather cloaks, over lakes and rivers frozen by the mighty frost, round the entire circuit of Ireland. Some ten years later, Cellachan, king of Cashel, took up the fight; with his linen-coated soldiers against the mail-clad foreigners, he swept the whole of Munster, capturing Limerick, Cork, Cashel and Waterford, and joining their Danish armies to his own troops; till he closed his campaign by calling out the Munster fleet from Kinsale to Galway bay, six or seven score of them, to meet the Danish ships at Dundalk. The Norsemen used armour, and rough chains of blue iron to grapple the enemies' ships, but the Irish sailors, with t

n who lived, as they said, "on the ridge of the world"-a land of unconquered peoples of the open plains and the mountains and the sea, left the Scandinavian empire with a ragged edge out on the line of the Atlantic commerce. King Cnut sent out his men for the last conquest. A vast host gathered in Dublin bay "from all the west of Europe," from Norway, the Baltic islands, the Orkneys, Iceland, for the landing at Clontarf. From sunrise to sunset the battle raged, the hair of the warriors flying in the

few years of special calamity, had held the national assemblies of the country at Telltown, not far from Tara. The tribesmen of the sub-kingdoms, if their ancient place of assembly had been turned into a Danish fort, held their meeting in a hidden marsh or wood. Thus when Cashel was held by the Norsemen, the assembly met on a mound that rose in the marshy glen now called Glanworth. There Cellachan, the rightful heir, in the best of arms and dress, demanded that the nobles shou

might be compared with that other great Irishman of his time, John Scotus, whom Charles the Bald had made head of his school. Irish teachers had a higher skill than any others in Europe in astronomy, geography and philosophy. Side by side with monastic schools the lay schools had continued without a break. By 900 the lawyers had produced at least eighteen law-books whose names are known, and a glossary. A lay scholar, probably of the ninth century, compiled the instructions of a king to his son-"Learning every art, knowledge of every language, skill in variegated work, pleading with established maxims"-these are the sciences he recommends. The Triads, compiled about the same time, count among the ornaments of wisdom, "abundance of knowledge, a number of precedents." Irish poets, men and women, were the first in Europe to sing of Nature-of summer and winter, of the cuckoo with the grey mantle, the blackbird's lay, the red bracken and the long hair of the heather, the talk of the rushes, the green-ba

emained Gaelic, of their native soil. No jeweller's work was ever more perfect than the Ardagh chalice of the ninth or tenth century, of pure Celtic art with no trace of Danish influence. The metal-workers of Munster must have been famous, from the title of "king Cellachan of the lovely cups"; and the golden case that enclosed the Gospel of Columcille in 1000 was for its splendour "the chief relic from the western world." The stone-workers, too,

n he let them be judged by the law; and from this one may mark what a king he must have been." "He sent professors and masters to teach wisdom and knowledge, and to buy books beyond the sea and the great ocean, because the writings and books in every church and sanctuary h

. Irishmen were willing to absorb the foreigners, to marry with them, and even at times to share their wars. They learned from them to build ships, organise naval forces, advance in trade, and live in towns; they used the northern words for the parts of a ship, and the streets of a town. In outward and material civilisation they accepted the latest Scand