In the conquest of Ulster we have, perhaps, the most striking exploit of the whole invasion. Accomplished by individual, and indeed unauthorized, enterprise, it was not complicated, as in the south, by native co-operation or royal interference, but was carried through by the reckless daring of a single adventurer and his band. With two and twenty knights and some three hundred followers, John de Courci set forth from Dublin, about the close of January, 1177, to conquer the kingdom of Ulster. Eager for plunder and the joys of the foray, there had flocked to his standard those adventurous spirits who chafed beneath the strict rule of the governor, William Fitz Audelin. In the depth of winter they hurried forth, and reaching Down by forced marches on the fourth day from leaving Dublin, were enabled to seize it by a _coup de main_. Masters thus of the capital of the land, they had also secured a maritime base invaluable for their further operations. The Irish, stunned by the suddenness of the blow, had fled, carrying their king with them, and the adventurers were soon revelling in the plunder they had sought. In vain the natives, rallying from their flight, endeavoured to recapture their lost stronghold. Like the garrison of Dublin when beset by Roderick O’Conor and his host, John and his handful of followers sallied forth upon their foes. Giraldus shows us their leader as he lived, towering in height above his fellows, a man of war from his youth up, whose only fault was the martial ardour that led him, when the battle raged, to forget the general in the soldier, as he charged headlong on his foes. Mounted on his famous white war horse, he now performed, as usual, Homeric deeds of valour, lopping off the heads and limbs of his enemies with a sweep of his tremendous sword. The Irish, though beaten at length, attacked him again in the summer, only to experience again defeat at his hand. But so desperate was the struggle for the land that in one of his battles he was left with only eleven knights. With their horses slain, and without food, the little band fought their way, for thirty miles, through their foes, and made good their escape. By sheer hard fighting ‘Ulvestere’--now Down and Antrim--was at length virtually subdued and then ‘castled’ by John. In time there rose on every side those strongholds of which the crumbling ruins long bore witness to the harassed lives of the alien lords of the land. Dreading the perils of the cloud-swept glens, and creeping from rock to rock within sound of that troubled sea, the “Barons of Ulster,” in their eyries, perched on the basalt crags, wrought about the land a belt of conquest of which we have the noblest relic in the wild glory of Dunluce. Their heirs still lingered on, four centuries later, clinging “in great poverty and peril” to the lands their ancestors had won. The Savages, the Jordans, the Russells could still be recognised by their names, but we read of the “Fitzurses, now