Irish kings had been tributary; the ruler over the Basque provinces, from whence undoubtedly the Irish race had sprung. To fill up what was lacking in these titles, he was proclaimed lord and ruler by a yet clearer divine right, when in 1155 John of Salisbury brought to him from Rome a bull, by which the English Pope, Hadrian IV., as supreme lord of all islands, granted Ireland to the English king, that he might bring the people under law, and enlarge the borders of the Church. From the beginning, indeed, there rested on the unhappy country a curse which has remained to the present moment. The invasion of the Ostmen was the first of a series of half-conquests which brought all the evils of foreign invasion with none of its benefits. In England the great rivers and the Roman roads had been so many highways by which the Scandinavians had penetrated into the heart of the country. But in Ireland no road and no great river had guided the invader onwards past morass and bog and forest. While the great host of the Danish invaders swooped down over England and Gaul, the pirates that sailed to Ireland had only force to dash themselves on the coast, and there cling cautiously to guarded settlements. They settled as a race apart, as unable to mix with the Irish people as they were powerless to conquer them. No memory as in England of a common origin united them, no ties of a common language, no sense of common law or custom, or of a common political tradition. The strangers built the first cities, coined the first money, and introduced trade. But they were powerless to affect Irish civilization. The tribal system survived in its full strength, and Ireland remained divided between two races, two languages, two civilizations in different stages of progress, two separate communities ruled by their own laws, and two half-completed ecclesiastical systems, for the Danish Church long looked, as the Irish had never done, to the Archbishop of Canterbury as their head. Earnest attempts had already been made by Hadrian's predecessor to bring the Irish into closer connection with the see of Rome. In 1152 a papal legate had carried out a great reform by which four archbishops, wholly independent of Canterbury and receiving their palls from Rome, were set over four provinces. But still no Peter's Pence were paid to Rome; Roman canon law, Roman ritual, the Roman rules of marriage, had no authority; the Roman form of baptism was replaced by a tradition which made the father dip his new-born child three times in water, or, if he were a rich man, in milk; there was no payment of tithes; clerks were taxed like laymen when a homicide occurred; Irish nobles still demanded hospitality from religious houses, and claimed, according to ancient custom, provisions from towns on Church domains. Hadrian himself had long been interested in Irish affairs. The religious houses which the Irish maintained in Germany kept up communication with Pope and Emperor; an