sometimes exerted with
injustice. Now therefore, when the news spread from altar to altar, and
from cabin to cabin, that the strangers were to be driven out, and that
their houses and lands were to be given as a booty to the children of
the soil, a predatory war commenced. Plunderers, thirty, forty, seventy
in a troop, prowled round the town, some with firearms, some with pikes.
The barns were robbed. The horses were stolen. In one foray a hundred
and forty cattle were swept away and driven off through the ravines of
Glengariff. In one night six dwellings were broken open and pillaged. At
last the colonists, driven to extremity, resolved to die like men rather
than be murdered in their beds. The house built by Petty for his agent
was the largest in the place. It stood on a rocky peninsula round
which the waves of the bay broke. Here the whole population assembled,
seventy-five fighting men, with about a hundred women and children. They
had among them sixty firelocks, and as many pikes and swords. Round the
agent's house they threw up with great speed a wall of turf fourteen
feet in height and twelve in thickness. The space enclosed was about
half an acre. Within this rampart all the arms, the ammunition and the
provisions of the settlement were collected, and several huts of thin
plank were built. When these preparations were completed, the men of
Kenmare began to make vigorous reprisals on their Irish neighbours,
seized robbers, recovered stolen property, and continued during
some weeks to act in all things as an independent commonwealth. The
government was carried on by elective officers, to whom every member of
the society swore fidelity on the Holy Gospels, [126]

While the people of the small town of Kenmare were thus bestirring
themselves, similar preparations for defence were made by larger
communities on a larger scale. Great numbers of gentlemen and yeomen
quitted the open country, and repaired to those towns which had
been founded and incorporated for the purpose of bridling the native
population, and which, though recently placed under the government of
Roman Catholic magistrates, were still inhabited chiefly by Protestants.
A considerable body of armed colonists mustered at Sligo, another
at Charleville, a third at Marlow, a fourth still more formidable at
Bandon, [127] But the principal strongholds of the Englishry during this
evil time were Enniskillen and Londonderry.

Enniskillen, though the capital of