Let it not be thought that the silence of the annals in other years is compatible with the absence of the unrecorded event. The entry of the year 873 puts this possibility out of question. It says: "The Assembly of Taillte is not held, in the absence of just and worthy cause, a thing which we have not heard to have befallen from ancient times." Nevertheless, that there was sufficient cause in the disturbed condition of the country owing to the Norse wars is made evident, for the chronicler has to record the abandonment of the Assembly three years later, in 876, when again he denies a just and worthy cause; and again in the second year after that, in 878, without just and worthy cause. When we come to 888, we are told only that the Assembly fell through. This is repeated in 889, and then, when the failure to hold the Assembly becomes annual and, so to speak, normal, the annalist ceases to record it. The next we hear of this institution is in 916, and once more it is the unwonted thing that is chronicled. In that year, the Assembly of Taillte was restored by the high-king, Niall Glúndubh. Hence it would appear that the half-century preceding 916 was the period during which the disturbance of normal conditions in Ireland reached its maximum; and this is also the period of maximum activity for the Norsemen in neighbouring countries. Aedh Finnliath died in the monastery of Dromiskin in 879. Dromiskin is in Co. Louth, near the sea-coast, and the fact that it was there the high-king "fell asleep," _i.e._ died a peaceful death in religious retirement, testifies to his success in checking the menace of the Norsemen in northern Ireland. He was succeeded in the monarchy, according to the custom of alternation, by Flann Sinna, king of Meath.