fied his camp near Waterford. In August 1170 came
Earl Richard himself, who had crossed to France in search of Henry, and
with persistent importunity implored for leave to join the Irish war.
Henry, at that moment busy in his last negotiations with Thomas, gave a
doubtful half-consent, and Richard sailed with an army of nearly fifteen
hundred men. We see in the pages of Gerald of Wales, the hero with whose
name the conquest of Ireland was to be for ever associated, red-haired,
gray-eyed, freckled, with delicate features like a woman's, and thin,
feeble voice; wearing a plain citizen's dress without arms, "that he
might seem more ready to obey than to command;" suave, gracious, politic,
patient, deferential, with his fine aristocratic air, and an undaunted
courage that blazed out in battle, when "he never moved from his post, but
remained a beacon of refuge to his followers." At his coming Waterford was
taken, as Wexford and Ossory had been before. Before the prudent Norman
went farther the marriage contract was carried out, and the beginning of a
strife which lasted for seven hundred years was celebrated in this first
alliance of a Norman baron and an Irish chief. Richard and Diarmait
marched against Dublin, and its Danishin habitants were driven over sea.
In a few months their king, Hasculf, returned with a great fleet gathered
from Norway, the Hebrides, the Orkneys, Man,--the last fleet of Northmen
which descended on the British Isles,--but again the Normans won the day.

Henry meanwhile was watching nervously the progress of affairs. The war
was, no doubt, useful in withdrawing from Wales a restless and dangerous
baronage, and in the rebellion of 1174 the hostility of the border
barons would have been far more serious if the best warriors of Wales
had not been proving their courage on the plains of Ireland. But Henry
had no mind to break through his general policy by allowing a feudal
baronage to plant themselves by force of arms in Ireland, as they had in
earlier days settled themselves in northern England and on the Welsh
border. The death of Diarmait in 1171 brought matters to a crisis. By
Celtic law the land belonged to the tribe, and the people had the right
of electing their king. But the tribal system had long been forgotten by
the Normans, whose ancestors had ages before passed out of it into the
later stage of the feudal system; and by Norman law the kingdom of
Leinster would pass to Aeifi's husband and her ch