e been as
little able to govern the country for themselves as before.

This also explains what is often set down as the inexplicable want of
patriotism shown by the native Irish in not combining more resolutely
together against their assailants. It is true that they did not do so,
but the fact is not referred to the right cause. An Englishman of the
time of the Heptarchy had, if at all, little more patriotism, and hardly
more sense of common country. He was a Wessex man, or a Northumbrian, or
a man of the North or the East Angles, rather than an Englishman. So too
in Ireland. As a people the Irish of that day can hardly be said to have
had any corporate existence. They were O'Briens, or O'Neils, or
O'Connors, or O'Flaherties, and that no doubt in their own eyes appeared
to be quite nationality enough.

Unfortunately both for the country and for his own successors, Henry had
no time to carry out his plans, and all that he had begun to organize
fell away into disorder again after his departure. "That inconstant
sea-nymph," says Sir John Davis, "whom the Pope had wedded to him with a
ring," remained obedient only as long as her new lord was present, and
once his back was turned she reverted to her own ways again. The crowd
of Norman and Welsh adventurers who now filled the country were each and
all intent upon ascertaining how much of that country they could seize
upon and appropriate for themselves. There were many gallant men amongst
them, but there was not one apparently who had the faintest trace of
what is meant by public spirit. Occupied only by their own interests,
and struggling solely for their own share of the spoil, they could never
really hold the country, and even those parts which they did get into
their hands lapsed back after a while into the old condition again.

The result was that the fighting never ended. The new colonists built
castles and lived shut up in them, ruling their own immediate retainers
with an odd mixture of Brehon and Norman law. When they issued forth
they appeared clad from head to foot in steel, ravaging the country more
like foreign mercenaries than peaceful settlers. The natives, driven to
bay and dispossessed of their lands, fought too, not in armour, but,
like the Berserkers of old, in their shirts, with the addition at most
of a rude leather helmet, more often only with their hair matted into a
sort of cap on their foreheads in the fashion known as the "gibbe," that
"rascally gi