ce had some time previously
been recalled to Scotland, and Sir John de Bermingham, the victor of
Athenry, pushing northward at the head of 15,000 chosen troops, met the
younger Bruce at Dundalk. The combat was hot, short, and decisive. The
Scots were defeated, Edward Bruce himself killed, and his head struck
off and sent to London. The rest hastened back to Scotland with as
little delay as possible. The Scotch invasion was over.

It was over, but its effects remained. From one end of Ireland to the
other there was disaffection, anger, revolt. England had proved too weak
or too negligent to interfere at the right time and in the right way,
and although successful in the end she could not turn back the tide.
There was a general feeling of disbelief in the reality of her
government. A semi-national feeling had sprung up which temporarily
united colonists and natives in a bond of self-defence. Norman nobles
and native Irish chieftains threw in their lot together. The English
yeoman class, which had begun to get established in Leinster and
Munster, had been all but utterly destroyed by Edward Bruce, and the
remnant now left the country in despair. The great English lords, with
the exception of Ormond and Kildare, from this out took Irish names and
adopted Irish dress and fashions. The two De Burghs, as already stated,
seized upon the Connaught possessions of their cousin, and divided them,
taking the one Galway and the other Mayo, and calling themselves
McWilliam Eighter and McWilliam Oughter, or the Nether and the Further
Burkes. So too with nearly all the rest. Bermingham of Athenry, in spite
of his late famous victory over the Irish, did the same, calling himself
McYorris; Fitzmaurice of Lixnaw became McMaurice; FitzUrse of Louth,
McMahon; and so on through a whole list.

Nor is it difficult to understand the motives which led to these
changes. The position of an Irish chieftain--with his practically
limitless powers of life and death, his wild retinue of retainers whose
only law was the will of their chief--offered an irresistible temptation
to men of their type, and had many more charms than the narrow and
uninteresting _role_ of liegeman to a king whom they never saw, and the
obeying of whose behests brought them harm rather than good. England had
shown only too plainly that she had no power to protect her Irish
colonists, of what use therefore, it was asked, for them to call
themselves any longer English? The great m