This principle of private taxation, as a right granted by the sovereign, came over to Ireland with the De Courcys and De Lacys and their like. But it by no means overspread Ireland in a single tide, as in England, after Hastings was lost and won. Its progress was slow; so slow, indeed, that the old communal system lingers here and there at the present day. The communal chiefs lived their lives side by side with the Norman barons, fighting now with the barons, now with each other; and the same generous rivalry, as we have seen, led to abundant fighting among the barons also. The principle of feudal ownership was working its way, however. We shall see later how great was its ultimate influence,--not so much by direct action, as in the quite modern reaction which its abuse provoked--a reaction from which have been evolved certain principles of value to the whole world. Leaving this force to work its way through the centuries, we may turn now to the life of the times as it appeared to the men and women who lived in them, and as they themselves have recorded it. We shall find fewer great personalities; nor should we expect this to be otherwise, if we are right in thinking that the age of struggle, with its efflorescence of great persons, had done its work, and was already giving way before the modern spirit, with its genius for the universal rather than the personal. We shall have contests to chronicle during the following centuries, whether engendered within or forced upon us from without; but they are no longer the substance of our history. They are only the last clouds of a departing storm; the mists before the dawn of the modern world. The most noteworthy of these contests in the early Norman age was the invasion under Edward Bruce, brother of the Scottish king, who brought a great fleet and army to Larne, then as now the Irish port nearest to the northern kingdom. The first sufferers by this invasion were the Normans of Heath, and we presently find these same Normans allied with Feidlimid son of Aed Ua Concobar and the Connachtmen, fighting side by side against the common foe. This was in 1315; two years later Robert Bruce joined his brother, and it was not till 1319 that Edward Bruce finally fell at Dundalk, "and no achievement had been performed in Ireland for a long time before," the Chronicler tells us, "from which greater benefit had accrued to the country than from this; for during the three and a half years that Edward had spent in it, a universal famine prevailed to such a degree that men were wont to devour one another."