In the first days of May[454] Robert Fitz-Stephen landed at Bannow, between Wexford and Waterford, with thirty picked knights of his own immediate following, and a body of auxiliaries to the number of sixty men-at-arms and three hundred archers.[455] With him came three of his nephews, Meiler Fitz-Henry, Miles Fitz-David[456] and Robert de Barri;[457] and also a ruined knight called Hervey of Mountmorris, uncle of Richard de Clare.[458] Next day an independent adventurer, Maurice de Prendergast, arrived from Milford with ten more knights and a band of archers.[459] Dermot himself came to meet them with some five hundred Irishmen. The united force marched upon Wexford, and took it in two days;[460] they then established their head-quarters at Ferns,[461] and thence made an expedition into Ossory, whose chieftain was specially hostile to Dermot. In spite of overwhelming odds, through all the difficulties of an unknown country full of woods and marshes, and traps laid against them by their skilful foes, the Norman-Welsh knights and archers made their way into the heart of Ossory; and a great battle ended in the rout of the Irish and the bringing of two hundred heads to Dermot’s feet in his camp on the banks of the Barrow.[462] A successful raid upon Offaly was followed by one upon Glendalough, and a third upon Ossory again,[463] till in the following year the state of affairs in Leinster had become threatening enough to drive all the Irish princes and the Ostmen of Dublin into a confederacy under Roderic O’Conor for the expulsion of the intruders.[464] Dermot pledged himself to acknowledge Roderic as monarch of Ireland, and was in his turn acknowledged by Roderic as king of Leinster on condition that he should dismiss his foreign allies.[465] The agreement was however scarcely made when Maurice Fitz-Gerald landed at Wexford with some hundred and forty men;[466] these at once joined Dermot in an expedition against Dublin, and harried the surrounding country till the citizens were reduced to promise obedience.[467] Early in the next year Dermot’s son-in-law Donell O’Brien, king of Limerick or Northern Munster, succeeded by the help of Robert Fitz-Stephen in throwing off the authority of Roderick O’Conor.[468] Encouraged by these successes, Dermot now began to aspire in his turn to the monarchy of all Ireland;[469] but his auxiliaries were numerically insufficient; and the one from whom he had expected most had as yet failed to appear at all.

The history of Richard of Striguil is far from clear. From the number of troops which eventually accompanied him to Ireland it is evident that he had been during these two years actively preparing for his expedition; and it may even be that the extent of his preparations had drawn upon him the suspicions of King Henry. We only know that, for some cause or other, he was now a ruined man; his lands were forfeited to the Crown;[470] and he seems to have lingered on, absorbed in a desperate effort to regain Henry’s favour, and clinging to his lost home with a feeling that if he once turned his back upon it, he would never be allowed to see it again. A letter from Dermot, telling of the successes of his party in Leinster and renewing his former offers, forced him into action.[471] He made a last appeal to the king, intreating either for restoration of his lands or for the royal license to go and repair his fortunes elsewhere. Henry ironically bade him go, and he went.[472] On S. Bartholomew’s eve, 1170, he landed at Waterford with twelve hundred men;[473] next day he was joined by Raymond “the Fat,” a young warrior whom he had sent over three months before[474] with ten knights and seventy archers, and who with this small force had contrived to beat back an assault of three thousand Irishmen of Decies and Ostmen of Waterford upon his camp of wattle and thatch, hastily thrown up on the rocky promontory of Dundonulf.[475] On August 25 Richard and Raymond attacked Waterford; three assaults in one day carried both town and citadel;[476] seven hundred citizens were slaughtered,[477] and the officers of the fortress, whose names tell of northern blood, were made prisoners.[478] A few days later Richard was married at Waterford to Dermot’s daughter Eva.[479] He then joined his father-in-law in a circuitous march across the hills and through Glendalough,[480] whereby they avoided a great host which Roderic had gathered at Clondalkin to intercept them, and arrived in safety on S. Matthew’s day beneath the walls of Dublin.[481] Dermot sent his bard to demand the instant surrender of the town, with thirty hostages for its fidelity. A dispute arose, probably between the Irish and Danish inhabitants, as to the selection of the hostages;[482] Archbishop Laurence was endeavouring to compose the difficulty,[483] and Hasculf Thorgils’ son, a chieftain of northern blood who commanded the citadel, had actually promised to surrender it on the morrow,[484] when a sudden attack made by Raymond the Fat on one side and by a knight called Miles Cogan on the other carried the town before the leaders of either party knew what had happened.[485] A second rush won the citadel; Hasculf escaped by sea and took refuge in the Orkneys;[486] Dublin was sacked,[487] and left throughout the winter under the command of Miles Cogan,[488] while Richard of Striguil was guarding Waterford against the men of Munster,[489] and Dermot, from his old head-quarters at Ferns,[490] was making raid after raid upon Meath and Breffny.[491]

In vain did the Irish clergy meet in synod at Armagh and strive to avert the wrath which seemed to have been revealed against their country by a solemn decree for the liberation of the English slaves with whom, even yet, the houses of the Irish chieftains were filled.[492] One sentence from an Irish record of the next year may serve to illustrate the condition of the country: “Seven predatory excursions were made by the Ui-Maine into Ormond from Palm Sunday till Low Sunday.”[493] It made but little difference when at Whitsuntide Dermot, “by whom a trembling sod was made of all Ireland,” died at Ferns “of an insufferable and unknown disease—without a will, without penance, without the Body of Christ, without unction, as his evil deeds deserved.”[494] At that very moment a wiking fleet gathered from all the lands where the old sea-rovers’ life still lingered—Norway, the Hebrides, Orkney, Man—appeared in Dublin bay under the command of Hasculf, the exiled leader of the Ostmen, and of a northern chief whose desperate valour won him the title of “John the Furious”—in the English speech of that day, John the Wode.[495] Something of the spirit of the old northern sagas breathes again in the story of this, the last wiking-fight ever fought upon the soil of the British isles. Bard and historian alike tell of the mighty strokes dealt by the battle-axes of John and his comrades,[496] and how they had almost hewed their way into Dublin once more, when a well-timed sally of the besieged caught them at unawares in the rear;[497]—how an Irish chief named Gillamocholmog, whom Miles Cogan had posted on a neighbouring hill, chivalrously bidding him watch the course of the battle and join the winning side, rushed down with his followers at the critical moment and helped to complete the rout of the Ostmen;[498]—how John the Wode fell by the hand of Miles Cogan;[499]—how Hasculf was taken prisoner by Miles’s brother Richard and brought back to be reserved for ransom, and how his hot wiking-blood spoke in words of defiance which goaded his captors to strike off his head.[500] Fifteen hundred northmen fell upon the field; five hundred more were drowned in trying to regain their ships.[501] From the shores of Ireland, as from those of England, the last northern fleet was driven away by Norman swords.

The garrison of Dublin fought in truth even more desperately than their assailants; for they were fighting for their all. A remonstrance addressed by some of the Irish princes to the king of England against the aggressions of his subjects[502] can hardly have been needed to open Henry’s eyes to the danger gathering for him and his realm beyond the western sea. This little band of adventurers, almost all bound together by the closest ties of kindred,[503] were conquering Leinster neither for its native sovereign nor for their own, but were setting up a new feudal state independent of all royal control, under the leadership of a disgraced English baron. Such a state, if suffered to grow unhindered, would soon be far more dangerous to England than to Ireland, for it would be certain to play in every struggle of the feudal principle against the royal authority in England the part which the Ostmen had played of old in the struggles of the Danelaw. At the beginning of the year 1171 therefore Henry issued an edict prohibiting all further intermeddling of his subjects in Ireland, and bidding those who were already there either return before Easter or consider themselves banished for life.[504] Not a man went back; Richard of Striguil sent Raymond over to Normandy with a written protest to the king, pleading that his conquests had been undertaken with the royal sanction and that he was ready to place them at the king’s disposal;[505] but the “Geraldines,” as the kindred of Maurice Fitz-Gerald called themselves, seem to have at once accepted their sentence of exile and resolved to hold by their swords alone the lands which those swords had won.[506]

The hostility of the Ostmen had apparently ended with Hasculf’s defeat; thenceforth they seem to have made common cause with the new-comers in whom they were perhaps already beginning to recognize the stirrings of kindred blood. But, on the other hand, the position of Earl Richard and his comrades had been seriously weakened by Dermot’s death. The king of Leinster’s devise of his kingdom to his son-in-law was, like the grants which he had made to the Geraldines and like his own homage to King Henry, void in Irish law. In Irish eyes his death removed the last shadow of excuse for the presence of the strangers on Irish soil; their allies rapidly fell away;[507] and by midsummer the whole country rose against them as one man. Roderic O’Conor mustered the forces of the north; Archbishop Laurence of Dublin, whose family occupied an influential position in Leinster, called up the tribes of the south; while a squadron of thirty ships was hired from Jarl Godred of Man.[508] The aim of the expedition was to blockade Dublin, whither Earl Richard had now returned, and where almost all the leaders of the invasion, except Robert Fitz-Stephen and Hervey of Mountmorris, were now gathered together. The whole Irish land-force amounted to sixty thousand men; half of these were under the immediate command of Roderic, encamped at Castle-Knock;[509] Mac-Dunlevy, the chieftain of Uladh, planted his banner on the old battle-field of Clontarf;[510] Donell O’Brien, the king of North Munster, posted himself at Kilmainham; and Murtogh Mac-Murrough, a brother of Dermot, whom Roderic had set up as king of Leinster in 1167, took up his position at Dalkey.[511] To these were added, for the northern division, the men of Breffny and of East Meath under Tighernan O’Ruark, those of Oiriel or southern Ulster under Murtogh O’Carroll,[512] and those of West Meath under Murtogh O’Melaghlin; while the archbishop’s call had brought up the whole strength of Leinster except the men of Wexford and Kinsellagh;[513] and even these, as the sequel proved, were preparing to fight the same battle on other ground.