This, however, like the other two, would be only an addition by the later versifier, and does not affect the main fact that we are dealing with a metrical version of a story contemporaneous with the conquest, and enshrining in ll. 3064–3177 “the only connected account of the subinfeudation of Leinster and Meath ... that has come down to us, a sort of original Domesday Book of the first Anglo-Norman settlement.” As such, it has the advantage of date over the ‘Expugnatio’ of Giraldus; it is also instinct with evidence of native local knowledge; and, above all, it stands apart from any other authority in its independent point of view. Giraldus wrote, as is well known, largely with the object of glorifying his relatives, who made the invasion of Ireland almost a family undertaking; in Regan, on the other hand, we have the panegyrist of Dermot and the earl of Pembroke, who carried to such a height the spirit of party faction as to denounce as “traitors” all his countrymen who were opposed to Dermot and his foreign allies. The opening lines are, unfortunately, imperfect and so obscure that the nature of the materials from which the _trouvère_ worked and the exact share in their authorship due to Regan have been, and must remain, to some extent matters of conjecture. Mr. Orpen himself inclines to the belief that Regan supplied the unknown _trouvère_ with a tale already “put into metre”; but Dr. Liebermann has rightly urged the improbability of our poem being merely an adaptation of one previously composed. Indeed, that eminent scholar has advanced a theory of his own, namely, that the real original source was a “lost chronicle” about the conquest of Ireland which Giraldus Cambrensis had used in 1188 for his Expugnatio.’ And this theory he bases on some striking parallel passages.[342] To the few typical parallels adduced by Dr. Liebermann I would myself add some taken from the stirring tale of the saving of Dublin when, mad for revenge, the ousted Northmen assembled from all the isles of the north to regain their lost dominion. This sudden upleaping, for a moment, of the old wiking flame was but a splendid anachronism: like the Highland rising of the ‘forty-five,’ it was curiously out of date. Yet the old Scandinavian spirit, if dulled among the traders of Dublin, still burnt in the hardy rovers they had now summoned to their aid; and the Irish chieftain who stood aloof watching with his men the surging fray as the little band of Anglo-Normans strove to repel the onslaught, saw not merely rival conquerors, quarrelling, like vultures, for the spoil, but deadly foes whose own lives hung on the issue of that fight. But while in a fit of ‘berserker’ fury, ‘John the Mad’ led the attack against the eastern gate, Richard de Cogan, the governor’s brother, had privily sallied from another one:--