Soon after the departure of Dermid for Ireland, Robert Fitzstephen, the readiest of the warlike plotters, and the first of the invaders, sailed for that country at the head of thirty knights, sixty men in armor, and three hundred light-armed archers. In the fragrant ides of May, 1169, they landed on the Wexford coast, near Bannow, and thus, inconsequentially, began the Norman invasion of Ireland. De Prendergast arrived the following day with about the same number of fighting men. Only a few years ago, in removing some débris—the accumulation of ages—near Bannow, the laborers found the traces of the Norman camp-fires of 1169 almost perfectly preserved. The two adventurers sent tidings of their arrival to MacMurrough without delay, and he marched at once, with a powerful force of his own retainers to join them. All three, having united their contingents, marched upon the city of Wexford, many of whose inhabitants were lineal descendants of the Danes. They made a gallant defence, but were finally outmanœuvred, overpowered, and compelled to capitulate. Other towns of less importance submitted under protest to superior force. Indeed there seemed to be a total lack of military foresight and preparedness in all that section of Ireland in 1169. Fitzpatrick, Prince of Ossory, descended from that ally of the Danes who attacked the Dalcassians returning from Clontarf, alone opposed to the invaders a brave and even formidable front. He committed the mistake of accepting a pitched battle with MacMurrough and his allies, and was totally defeated. King Roderick O’Conor, hearing of the invasion, summoned the Irish military bodies to meet him at Tara. Most of them responded, but the Prince of Ulidia, MacDunlevy, took offence at some remark made by a Connaught prince, and, in consequence, most of the Ulster forces withdrew from the Ard-Righ. King Roderick, with the troops that remained, marched to attack MacMurrough at his favorite stronghold of Ferns, where he lay with the Normans, or a part of them, expecting a vigorous siege. Instead of assaulting the enemy’s lines at once, when his superior numbers would, most likely, have made an end of the traitor and his Norman allies, O’Conor weakly consented to a parley with Dermid, who was a most thorough diplomat. The Ard-Righ consented, further, to a treaty with MacMurrough, who, of course, designed to break it as soon as the main body of the Normans, under Strongbow in person, should arrive from Wales. He did not, nevertheless, hesitate to bind himself by a secret clause of the treaty with the king to receive no more foreigners into his army, and even gave one of his sons as a hostage to guarantee the same. The Ard-Righ retired from Ferns satisfied that the trouble was ended. The royal army was scarcely out of sight of the place when MacMurrough learned that Maurice Fitzgerald, at the head of a strong party of Normans, had also arrived on the Wexford coast. He now thought