The municipal system, which has won so much praise, was scornfully abandoned by the Irish to the Danes of the sea port towns, and they continued the agricultural life adapted to their tastes. Towns and cities were not built in the interior till much later by the English. The clan territories continued to be governed as before. The "Book of Rights" extended its enactments even to the Danish Pale; and the Danes tried to convert it to their own advantage by introducing into it false chapters. How the poem of the Gaels of Ath Cliath first found a place in the "Book of Rights" is still unknown to the best Irish antiquarians. John O'Donovan concludes from a verse in it that it was composed in the tenth century, after the conversion of the Danes of Dublin to Christianity. It proves certainly that the Scandinavians in Ireland, like the English of the Pale later on, had become attached to Erin and Erin's customs--had, in fact, become. Irishmen, to all intents and purposes. Not succeeding in making Northmen of the Irish, they succumbed to the gentle influence of Irish manners and religion. As for the commercial spirit, the Irish could not be caught by it, even when confronted by the spectacle of the wealth it conferred on the "foreigners." It is stated openly in the annals of the race that their greatest kings, both Malachi and Brian Boru, did not utterly expel the Danes from the country, in order that they might profit by the Scandinavian traders, and receive through them the wines, silks, and other commodities, which the latter imported from the continent of Europe. The same is true of the sea-faring life. The Irish could never be induced to adopt it as a profession, whatever may have been their fondness for short voyages in their curraghs. The only baneful effects which the Norse invasion exercised on the Irish were: 1. The interruption of studies on the large, even universal, scale on which, they had previously been conducted; 2. The breaking up of the former constitution of the monarchy, by compelling the several clans which were attacked by the "foreigners" to act independently of the Ard-Righ, so that from that time irresponsible power was divided among a much greater number of chieftains. But these unfortunate effects of the Norse irruptions affected in no wise the Irish character, language, or institutions, which, in fact, finally triumphed over the character, language, and institutions of the pirates established among them for upward of two centuries. CHAPTER VI. THE IRISH FREE CLANS AND ANGLO-NORMAN FEUDALISM. The Danes were subdued, and the Irish at liberty to go on weaving the threads of their history--though, in consequence of the local wars, they had lost the concentrating power of the Ard- Righ--when treachery in their own ranks opened up the way for a far more serious attack from another branch of the great Scandinavian family--the Anglo-Norman.