parateness that union in face of a common foe was almost
impossible. Long years of adverse fate were needed to merge the keen
individual instinct of old into the common consciousness of to-day.

Modern historians generally write as if the onslaught of the Northmen
had had this unifying effect; as if it had been a great calamity,
overwhelming the country for several centuries, and submerging its
original life under a tide of conquest. Here again the history of the
time, as recorded year by year in the Annals, leads us to a wholly
different conclusion. We find inroads of the Northmen, it is true; but
they are only interludes in the old national life of storm and struggle.
That enduring tribal conflict, of which we have already seen so much,
did not cease even for a year. Nor can it have greatly mattered to the
dwellers in some remote valley whether they were sacked, their cattle
driven off, and their children taken captive by strangers or by men of
their own land.

There was one chief difference: the foreigners, being still heathens,
did not spare the churches and the schools. The golden or silver
reliquaries, the jeweled manuscript-cases, the offerings of precious
stones and rich ornaments laid on the altars: these things proved an
irresistible temptation to the roving sea-kings. They often burned or
cast away the manuscripts, eager only to take the jeweled coverings, and
in this way many monuments of the olden time have been lost, and many
gaps in the history of the nation made irreparable. Yet it would seem
that even the loss of manuscripts has been exaggerated, since such
lavish abundance remains to us from the times before the first northern
raiders came. Many a remote shrine was never even approached by the
northern wanderers; and, in the long times of peace between raid and
raid, one school had time to gain from another copies of the books which
were lost. We may hope that the somewhat rigid views of copyright
expressed in the matter of St. Finian's Psalter were not invariably
adhered to. We have Chronicles kept with unbroken regularity year by
year through the whole of the epoch of Northern raids, and they by no
means indicate a period of national depression, nor justify us in
thinking of these raids as much more than episodes in the general
fighting of the nation,--the martial state through which every modern
country has passed before emerging to homogeneous life.

To come to the events themselves, as they appe