By the time that Edward completed, or nearly so, the conquest of France, the English power in Ireland had so shrunken as to be almost nominal. Dublin, Drogheda, Kilkenny, and Waterford were the chief garrisons of the English. The Lacys, Burkes, Fitzgeralds, and other Norman-Irish houses and clans were scarcely to be distinguished from the Milesian families and septs. Such fighting as they indulged in between themselves was comparatively trivial. The island, blessed with partial peace, began to grow more populous and prosperous. Edward, the Black Prince, having crowned himself with glory in France, died before he could inherit the crown of England. Edward III, not so old as worn out by ceaseless warfare, died in 1377, and after him came to the English throne Richard, son of the Black Prince, a handsome boy of sixteen, who, at first, gave promise of great deeds, but who subsequently proved himself a weakling and voluptuary. In Ireland, Ulster, Connaught, and Munster remained tranquil for the most part, but, in Leinster, the royal house of MacMurrough—lineal descendants of the traitor of Strongbow’s time—showed a determination to drive the remnant of the English garrison into the sea. They were as loyal to Ireland as their accursed ancestor had been faithless. King Art I, after a long series of successes and failures, died, and was succeeded on the Leinster throne by King Art II—one of the bravest, wisest, and truest characters in Irish history. He continued the war his father had begun. Richard II, like all of his race, was vain and greedy of military glory. As the war with France had closed for a period, he thought Ireland a good field in which to distinguish himself as a general. He had heard of “MacMore,” as he called MacMurrough, and longed to measure swords with him. Accordingly, in the summer of 1394, he landed at Waterford with a large army. The historian McGee estimates it at 35,000 horse and foot, but we are inclined to think it was much less. That it was formidable, for those times, all historians who have dealt with the subject are agreed upon. He was accompanied, also, by a large retinue of nobility, among them Roger Mortimer, the young Earl of March, who, because of the childlessness of Richard, was heir to the British throne, through descent from the Duke of Clarence, in the female line. Richard did not wait long in Waterford, but proceeded on his march to Dublin, unfurling the banner of Edward the Confessor, for whom the Irish were supposed to have a deep veneration. MacMurrough, however, showed scant courtesy to the Confessor’s ensign, not because it was the banner of a saint, but because, for the time, it represented the rapacity of England. Richard was met boldly at every point. His bowmen got tangled up in the woods. His horsemen floundered in the bogs. MacMurrough’s army hovered in his front, on his flanks, and in rear. Not a single success did the English monarch gain. He summoned MacMurrough