The comparative ease and rapidity with which a handful of adventurers had parcelled out among themselves the most fertile portions of the island is perhaps the most surprising feature of the whole story. It is certain that the native Irish were by no means wanting in courage; indeed, they were then, as they always have been, only too ready to fight. Their weapons were good and were skilfully wielded; but like the wild Celts of Galloway, who had hurled themselves in vain, at the Battle of the Standard, against a line of mailed warriors, they scorned the use of defensive armour. Their mode of warfare was essentially suited to woods and bogs and passes, while their assailants were accustomed, from continental warfare, to cavalry actions in the open. Combining the evidence of our poem with that of Master Gerald, we can see clearly that, as in so many decisive encounters, from Hastings itself to Culloden, the issue turned on the conflict of wholly differing tactics. Precisely as at Hastings, the Normans--now the Anglo-Normans--enjoyed the enormous advantage derived from the use of the bow. Giraldus, whatever his defects, was a shrewd and sound observer; and he tells us of the demoralizing effect on the natives, in the early days of the conquest, of the arrows against which they had no means of defence. Careful investigation shows that each band of the invaders landed with a force of knights and archers, the latter being usually found in the proportion of ten to one. In the combined action of these two arms, as at the great battle which had decided the fate of England, the Normans excelled. “In Hibernis conflictibus,” wrote Gerald, “hoc summopere curandum, ut semper arcarii militibus turmis mixtim adjiciantur.” As Harold had discovered, before the Conquest, how unsuitable was a force composed of heavily-armed English infantry for pursuit of the nimble Welsh, as Richard was shortly to find his host of mailed knights and men-at-arms harassed to death by the swift movements of the light Saracen cavalry, so, writes Gerald, the Irish could only be successfully attacked by troops able to pursue them among their mountain fastnesses. Nor are his criticisms less true for being animated, as they evidently are, by the scorn of his gallant relatives, as the pioneers of the conquest, for those later comers who despised their experience, and on whom they looked in their fierce warfare, as a rough colonist of the present day would look on a pipeclayed guardsman.