By this compromise they acknowledged his ownership of their own waters, and the long struggle between the City which financed the Plantation and its adversaries fizzled out in a dismal attornment. A title, guaranteed to them by the charters and promises of three Kings and the parchments of Oliver Cromwell, was abandoned for ever. Holding genuine and undoubted grants, they did homage to the suspect scrivenery of the freebooters who for three centuries had plotted to despoil them. What could explain such a nerveless breakdown? No doubt Fitzgibbon’s bemusement as to the Act of Settlement misled them, but why was there no one to unravel the mystery of iniquity lurking behind the deeds of 1661, 1656, 1621, 1611, 1608, 1606, or 1603-4? In 1872, when they capitulated, the work of the Irish and English Record Offices had shed much light on the grants and confiscations of the Stuart and Cromwellian periods. The documents in the Rolls and Exchequer Offices had been translated, calendared, and indexed. State papers, inquisitions, and MSS. from a number of libraries had been published. It was with all these sources of information thrown open that the Irish Society, having begun their assertion of title, tamely acknowledged the overlordship of their ancient enemy. When the richest Corporation in the world, and the Imperial city of the Empire, could be baffled in such wise, what hope had the natives in days of yore of retaining their property against the greed of those who controlled the machinery of Irish government? CHAPTER XXVII. TWO GREAT TRIALS. The acceptance by the Londoners of the parchments of Lord Donegall was an event of mournful significance for East Ulster. The concern of the public in it was immediate, for it created a new situation which affected everyone along the banks of Lough Neagh. When such powerful opponents confessed the validity of the Donegall grant, and accepted a lease thereunder, they became almost as much interested in maintaining it as the owner himself. Before their capitulation nobody had ventured to dispute the ancient custom by which the public fished in and trafficked over the Lough. The moment a great Corporation bent the knee to wrong, an unexpected impulse was given to the spirit of encroachment. Once they yielded, with what hope could poor men hold out? The thought, therefore, struck the Donegall lessee who claimed Lough Neagh as being embraced in his demise that to turn a thousand free fishermen into toll-paying serfs would prove a profitable enterprise. To assert his “rights” he took proceedings to restrain them from catching salmon in the Lough. For five years this action dragged from Court to Court, and only ended in the House of Lords in 1878.