y historians
remembered that their king was representative of Gerguntius, the first
king of Britain who had gone to Ireland; the heir of Arthur, to whom
Irish kings had been tributary; the ruler over the Basque provinces,
from whence undoubtedly the Irish race had sprung. To fill up what was
lacking in these titles, he was proclaimed lord and ruler by a yet
clearer divine right, when in 1155 John of Salisbury brought to him from
Rome a bull, by which the English Pope, Hadrian IV., as supreme lord of
all islands, granted Ireland to the English king, that he might bring
the people under law, and enlarge the borders of the Church.

From the beginning, indeed, there rested on the unhappy country a curse
which has remained to the present moment. The invasion of the Ostmen was
the first of a series of half-conquests which brought all the evils of
foreign invasion with none of its benefits. In England the great rivers
and the Roman roads had been so many highways by which the Scandinavians
had penetrated into the heart of the country. But in Ireland no road and
no great river had guided the invader onwards past morass and bog and
forest. While the great host of the Danish invaders swooped down over
England and Gaul, the pirates that sailed to Ireland had only force to
dash themselves on the coast, and there cling cautiously to guarded
settlements. They settled as a race apart, as unable to mix with the
Irish people as they were powerless to conquer them. No memory as in
England of a common origin united them, no ties of a common language, no
sense of common law or custom, or of a common political tradition. The
strangers built the first cities, coined the first money, and introduced
trade. But they were powerless to affect Irish civilization. The tribal
system survived in its full strength, and Ireland remained divided
between two races, two languages, two civilizations in different stages
of progress, two separate communities ruled by their own laws, and two
half-completed ecclesiastical systems, for the Danish Church long looked,
as the Irish had never done, to the Archbishop of Canterbury as their
head. Earnest attempts had already been made by Hadrian's predecessor to
bring the Irish into closer connection with the see of Rome. In 1152 a
papal legate had carried out a great reform by which four archbishops,
wholly independent of Canterbury and receiving their palls from Rome, were
set over four provinces. But still no Peter