A misfortune overtook Murtough soon after his return home. The Northern foreigners laid siege to his fortress, and succeeded in taking him prisoner, and carrying him off to their ships. The prince was ransomed by his people, and took his revenge by penetrating with his fleet to the Hebrides, and carrying off much booty from their Norse inhabitants. This successful foreign expedition so much increased his fame that we find him soon afterwards making a warlike circuit of the entire country, and taking hostages of all the provincial kings of Ireland. It was this circuit through Ireland that gained him his title of “Murtough of the Leather Cloaks,” from the warm cloaks of rough hide or leather which he and his attendants wore to protect them from the cold. The famous journey was performed in the depth of the winter of 942, after his return from “Insi-Gall,” or the Isles of the Foreigners, as the Hebrides were frequently called. He summoned all the clans over whom he ruled, and chose out of them a bodyguard of a thousand picked men, with whom he proceeded eastward into Antrim, then south to Dublin, thence into Leinster and Munster, and homeward through Connaught to Ulster again. Leinster and Munster threatened to oppose him, but the sight of his thousand chosen warriors seems to have deterred them. Murtough took with him his clan bard, who has written in verse which still exists an account of their journey. Their leather cloaks they used for wraps by day and for tents by night. Snow often lay deep on the ground on which they had to sleep, but they would “dance to music on the plain, keeping time to the heavy shaking of their cloaks.” Murtough returned home with an imposing array of princes as his hostages, for none dare refuse to acknowledge his supremacy. Sitric, a Danish lord of Dublin, was delivered to him by the Northmen; a prince of Leinster followed, and a young son of Tadhg of the Towers, King of Connaught, who alone went unfettered, while all the others were in chains. But his most audacious stroke was the demand that Callaghan, King of Cashel, in Munster, should be delivered to him fettered. Such an unheard-of demand was not easily acquiesced in; but Murtough would accept no other hostage, and at length, apparently at the King’s own request, he was delivered into the hands of the proud prince of the North. This fettering of a King of Munster caused a sensation at the time and was the burthen of many poems.