Page 149 - Demo

Chapter Five 149
groups of Norman ighters knew the art of war in a manner that doubled their efectiveness when in battle. They were well-trained, well-organized, full-time professional soldiers, who possessed a skill, and a wonderful discipline, together with a system of menacing warfare, that was utterly unknown in the Irish ranks.
They also had armour and eminently superior arms, against which the weapons of the Irish were initially of little use. Furthermore, they were excellent builders, and their strong castles helped them to retain the lands which they seized from the Irish.
The Normans not only marked their progress by much slaughter and many barbarities, but signalized themselves by robbing and burning churches and monasteries, and oftentimes butchering the inmates. They harried, robbed, ravaged, and destroyed wheresoever they went. Terrifyingly true are the words of the Four Masters which tell that Dermot MacMur- rough’s treachery “made of Ireland a trembling sod.” Unsurprisingly, all these attributes had a telling efect on the minds of the local chieftains.
But against this must be set the important fact that the Irish knew the country and the invaders did not. The Irish forests, bogs and mountains, while admirably suited to the light- armed, leet-footed Irish soldiers, who, though not as experienced in warfare as their enemy, adapted and utilised the inaccessibility and remoteness of the terrain expertly, were just the reverse for the heavily armed and armoured Normans and their cumbersome mounts. In other words, the Irish princes set strategy against skill, and as an ancient sage once mused, ‘the hardest country in the world, and the hardest people in the world to conquer are per- haps the Irish. Defeated in one place, they rose up again in another, and by doing so they discovered that the Normans were not omnipotent’
So Ireland was once again set for further bloody conlict, and the argument that Henry’s treacherous action in making grants to his supporters, of land which had not yet been oc- cupied by the Normans and to which they could not lay claim, even by right of conquest, naturally brought war in its train, proved calamitously correct.
Having been granted the fertile lands of Meath, Hugh de Lacy quickly set about oc- cupying that territory. Ruthless and relentless in his methods, it is documented that de Lacy often stooped to murder and assassination to rid himself of opponents, and one of the irst victims of his deadly double-dealing was Tiernan O Ruairc/Rourke, king of Brefni, and former enemy of Dermot McMurrough. O Rourke’s death removed a serious obstacle to