e Saxon aristocracy
had mansions richly furnished, and sideboards gorgeous with silver bowls
and chargers. All this wealth disappeared. One house, in which there had
been three thousand pounds' worth of plate, was left without a spoon,
[154] But the chief riches of Ireland consisted in cattle. Innumerable
flocks and herds covered that vast expanse of emerald meadow, saturated
with the moisture of the Atlantic. More than one gentleman possessed
twenty thousand sheep and four thousand oxen. The freebooters who now
overspread the country belonged to a class which was accustomed to
live on potatoes and sour whey, and which had always regarded meat as
a luxury reserved for the rich. These men at first revelled in beef and
mutton, as the savage invaders, who of old poured down from the forests
of the north on Italy, revelled in Massic and Falernian wines. The
Protestants described with contemptuous disgust the strange gluttony of
their newly liberated slaves. The carcasses, half raw and half burned
to cinders, sometimes still bleeding, sometimes in a state of loathsome
decay, were torn to pieces and swallowed without salt, bread, or herbs.
Those marauders who preferred boiled meat, being often in want of
kettles, contrived to boil the steer in his own skin. An absurd
tragicomedy is still extant, which was acted in this and the following
year at some low theatre for the amusement of the English populace. A
crowd of half naked savages appeared on the stage, howling a Celtic song
and dancing round an ox. They then proceeded to cut steaks out of the
animal while still alive and to fling the bleeding flesh on the coals.
In truth the barbarity and filthiness of the banquets of the Rapparees
was such as the dramatists of Grub Street could scarcely caricature.
When Lent began, the plunderers generally ceased to devour, but
continued to destroy. A peasant would kill a cow merely in order to get
a pair of brogues. Often a whole flock of sheep, often a herd of fifty
or sixty kine, was slaughtered: the beasts were flayed; the fleeces and
hides were carried away; and the bodies were left to poison the air.
The French ambassador reported to his master that, in six weeks, fifty
thousand horned cattle had been slain in this manner, and were rotting
on the ground all over the country. The number of sheep that were
butchered during the same time was popularly said to have been three or
four hundred thousand, [155]

Any estimate which can now b