What effect they produced upon
the natives may be seen from the description given by the unknown
historian of the "Wars of the Gaedhil with the Gaill": "In a
word, although there were an hundred hard-steeled iron heads on
one neck, and an hundred sharp, ready, cool, never-rusting brazen
tongues in each head, and an hundred garrulous, loud, unceasing
voices from each tongue, they could not recount, or narrate, or
enumerate, or tell what all the Gaedhil suffered in common --
both men and women, laity and clergy, old and young, noble and
ignoble -- of hardship, and of injury, and of oppression, in
every house, from these valiant, wrathful, purely pagan people.
Even though great were this cruelty, oppression, and tyranny,
though numerous were the oft-victorious clans of the many-
familied Erinn; though numerous their kings, and their royal
chiefs, and their princes; though numerous their heroes and
champions, and their brave soldiers, their chiefs of valour and
renown and deeds of arms; yet not one of them was able to give
relief, alleviation, or deliverance from that oppression and
tyranny, from the numbers and multitudes, and the cruelty and the
wrath of the brutal, ferocious, furious, untamed, implacable
hordes by whom that oppression was inflicted, because of the
excellence of their polished, ample, treble, heavy, trusty,
glittering corslets; and their hard, strong, valiant swords; and
their well-riveted long spears, and their ready, brilliant arms
of valour besides; and because of the greatness of their
achievements and of their deeds, their bravery, and their valour,
their strength, and their venom, and their ferocity, and because
of the excess of their thirst and their hunger for the brave,
fruitful, nobly-inhabited, full of cataracts, rivers, bays, pure,
smooth-plained, sweet grassy land of Erinn" -- (pp.
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