or of priests, but they robbed the monks and the clergy; and every man plundered his neighbour as much as he could. If two or three men came riding to a town, all the township fled before them and thought that they were robbers. The bishops and clergy were ever cursing them, but this to them was nothing, for they were all accurst and forsworn and reprobate. The earth bare no corn, you might as well have tilled the sea; for the land was all ruined by such deeds, and it was said openly that Christ and his saints slept. These things, and more than we can say, did we suffer during nineteen years because of our sins." It was in the very year that followed these nineteen years that Henry, in his council of barons at Winchester, first announced his intention of invading Ireland. The barons who formed the council were the castle-builders of the foregoing account written by their contemporary. From them and their sons were drawn the men who, we are to believe, came to establish law and order in the place of anarchy in Ireland; who were "to enter that island and execute whatsoever may tend to the honour of God and the welfare of the land"; who were "to restrain the downward course of vice, to correct evil customs, to implant virtue and extend the Christian religion"--these being the pious and laudable designs which Henry Plantagenet, who could not rule his own household or his own person, proposed at that time to his friend Pope Adrian. I have already adverted to Mr. Orpen's doctrine that the Irishman had no nation but his tribe. In all these things, a comparison and a contrast is studiously suggested. To what nation did the leaders of the invasion belong? Mr. Orpen calls them Normans, but they themselves knew nothing of Norman nationality. They knew that their lord was duke of Normandy and as such a vassal of France. Among themselves they knew no distinction of Norman, Angevin, Poitevin, or Aquitanian. The most English of them came of three generations of residence in England as a foreign element--as Franks. These were only a few. The majority had lived in Wales or the Welsh marches. At a very early stage in the invasion, one leader, Maurice de Prendergast, went right over to the Irish. Another, De Courci, set himself up as an independent prince in that region of intractable folk, eastern Ulster. The chief feature of Henry's Irish policy, continued by his son John, was not the subjugation of the Irish but the keeping of the Feudal lords of Ireland from becoming independent. Mr. Orpen does not like this policy. He calls it interference with the colony, and draws the moral of all his history by severely remarking that the same objectionable interference with the colony has been continued down to an indefinitely modern time. The lesson is meant to be taken to heart by somebody. The fact remains, that the colonists had no nationality until in the course of time they became Irelandmen, and ultimately