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156 Stephen Dunford: The Journey of The IrIsh
Anglo-Normans ceased to be formidable and unassailable, and they were forced to declare, ‘Better a castle of bones than a castle of Stones’-in other words, men fighting and dying in the open were then more effective than men trying to repel the Irish from behind stone battlements.
So now, having, earlier touched its lowest ebb, as many chroniclers recounted, the Irish power and Irish spirit was gathering strength again at the dawning of the fourteenth cen- tury-nearly one hundred and fifty years after Dermot McMurrough invited and brought the first Normans to these shores. This dawn signalled three notable indications of the re- surgence of the stoic nature of the Irish spirit-namely, the fight for liberty under Bruce, the Gaelicising of the Anglo-Normans, and the triumph of Art Mac Murrough.
The first sign came when, after King Robert Bruce of Scotland had overwhelmingly defeated the English forces of King Edward 11 at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, the inspired Irish, summoning new heart, invited Edward Bruce, brother of King Robert to rally the Irish nation. Unsurprisingly, Robert Bruce, whose family were part Irish by blood, was not averse to aiding a policy that made for the discomfiture of England, added to which Donal O’Neill, king of Tyrone, laying aside his own claim, offered the High-Kingship to Edward, providing that he succeeded in expelling “the cruel tyrants and usurpers.” Accord- ingly, King Robert readily granted his daring, reckless, and unstatesmanlike brother permis- sion to accept the offer of the crown of Ireland, and moreover, supplied him with a force of 6,000 mail-clad veterans. In May 1315, Edward landed at Latharna-present day Larne in county Antrim, and being joined immediately by Donal O’Neill and the Irish of Ulster, he marched victoriously as far south as the midlands, capturing many towns on the way.
To put a halt to Bruce’s progress, Richard de Burgo of Connacht, who had the title Earl of Ulster, and was known by the cognomen ‘the Red Earl,’ a man who just happened to be King Robert’s father-in-law at the time, mobilised a large army and went against him.
The two forces met at the Battle of Connor, in county Antrim, during which the Red Earl’s army was so thoroughly defeated and he humiliated to such an extent, that it practi- cally ended his career. Next, Bruce defeated an army under Roger de Mortimer at Kells, county Meath, before routing decisively a gigantic army of thirty thousand men led by Sir Edmund Butler, the Lord Justiciary, or Viceroy of Ireland, at Ardscoil, near Athy, in county
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