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These offenses aside, Celtic Kings should still be applauded for its highly successful balance of RTS and RPG elements. The adventure mode, which improves vastly over time, will provide a good 50 to 60 hours of game time to the average player, and is rewarding in its own right. There's something to be said for a point-and-click adventure in which you're controlling 40 soldiers, are offered assistance by another army of 40 or 50 men, and are then given the option to "call in the elite forces"... and still have trouble defeating the enemy.

Each tribe was supreme within its own borders; it elected its ownchief, and could depose him if he acted against law. The land belongedto the whole community, which kept exact pedigrees of the families whohad a right to share in the ground for tillage or in the mountainpasturage; and the chief had no power over the soil save as theelected trustee of the people. The privileges of the various chiefs,judges, captains, historians, poets, and so on, were handed down fromgeneration to generation. In all these matters no external power couldinterfere. The tribe owed to the greater tribe above it nothing [16]butcertain fixed dues, such as aid in road-making, in war, in ransom ofprisoners and the like.

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While each tribe had its schools, these were linked together in anational system. Professors of every school were free of the island;it was the warrior's duty to protect them as they moved from court tocourt. An ancient tale tells how the chiefs of Emain near Armaghplaced sentinels along the Gap of the North to turn back every poetwho sought to [20]leave the country and to bring on their way with honourevery one who sought to enter in. There was no stagnation wherecompetition extended over the whole island. The greatest of theteachers were given the dignity of "Professors of all the Gaels."Learned men in their degrees ranked with kings and chiefs, andhigh-professors sat by the high-king and shared his honours. The king,said the laws, "could by his mere word decide against every class ofpersons except those of the two orders of religion and learning, whoare of equal value with himself."

The weaknesses of the Irish system are apparent. The numerous smallterritories were tempted, like larger European states, to raidborders, to snatch land or booty, and to suffer some expense oftrained soldiers. Candidates for the chiefdom had to show theirfitness, and "a young lord's first spoil" was a necessary exploit.There were wild plundering raids in the summer nights; disorders weremultiplied. A country divided in government was weakened for purposesof offence, or for joint action in military matters. These evils weregenuine, but they have been exaggerated. Common action was hindered,not mainly by human contentions, but by the forests and marshes, lakesand rivers in flood that lay over a country heavy [23]with Atlanticclouds. Riots and forays there were, among a martial race and strongmen of hot passions, but Ireland was in fact no prominent example ofmedival anarchy or disorder. Local feuds were no greater than thosewhich afflicted England down to the Norman Conquest and long after it;and which marked the life of European states and cities through themiddle ages. The professional war bands of Fiana that hired themselvesout from time to time were controlled and recognised by law, and hadtheir special organisation and rites and rules of war. It has beensupposed that in the passion of tribal disputes men mostly perished bymurder and battle-slaughter, and the life of every generation was byviolence shortened to less than the common average of thirty years.Irish genealogies prove on the contrary that the generations must becounted at from thirty-three to thirty-six years: the tale of kings,judges, poets, and householders who died peacefully in an honoured oldage, or from some natural accident, outruns the list of sudden murdersor deaths in battle. Historical evidence moreover shows us a countryof [24]widening cornfields, or growing commerce, where wealth wasgathered, where art and learning swept like a passion over the people,and schools covered the land. Such industries and virtues do notflourish in regions given over to savage strife. And it is significantthat Irish chiefs who made great wars hired professional soldiers fromoversea.

Like the learning and the art, the new worship was adapted to tribalcustom. Round the little monastic church gathered a group of huts witha common refectory, the whole protected by a great rampart of earth.The plan was familiar to all the Irish; every chief's house had such afence, and every bardic school had its circle of thatched cells wherethe scholars spent years in study and meditation. Monastic "families"which branched off from the first house were grouped under the name ofthe original founder, in free federal union like that of [35]the clans.As no land could be wholly alienated from the tribe, territory givento the monastery was not exempted from the common law; it was ruled byabbots elected, like kings and judges of the tribe, out of the housewhich under tribal law had the right of succession; and the monks insome cases had to pay the tribal dues for the land and send outfighting men for the hosting.

These wars brought a very different fate to the English and the Irish.In England, when the Danes had planted a colony on every inlet of thesea (c. 800), they took horse and rode conquering over the inlandplains. They slew every English king and wiped out every English royalhouse save that of Wessex; and in their place set up their own kingsin Northumbria and East Anglia, and made of all middle England a vast"Danelaw" a land ruled by Danish law, and by confederations of Danishtowns. At the last Wessex itself was conquered, and a Danish kingruled over all England (1013). In Ireland, on the other hand, theinvincible [60]power of the tribal system for defence barred the way ofinvaders. Every foot of land was defended; every tribe fought for itsown soil. There could be no subjection of the Irish clans except bytheir extermination. A Norwegian leader, Thorgils, made one supremeeffort at conquest. He fixed his capital at Armagh and set up at itsshrine the worship of Thor, while his wife gave her oracles from thehigh altar of Clonmacnois on the Shannon, in the prophetess's cloakset with stones to the hem, the necklace of glass beads, the staff,and the great skin pouch of charms. But in the end Thorgils was takenby the king of Meath and executed, being cast into Loch Nair. TheDanes, who held long and secure possession of England, great part ofScotland, and Normandy, were never able to occupy permanently any partof Ireland more than a day's march from the chief stations of theirfleets. Through two hundred years of war no Irish royal house wasdestroyed, no kingdom was extinguished, and no national supremacy ofthe Danes replaced the national supremacy of the Irish.

"Limerick of the swift ships," "Limerick of the riveted stones," thekingdom lying on the Atlantic was a rival even to Dublin; kings of thesame house ruled in Limerick and the Hebrides, and their fleets tookthe way of the wide ocean; while Norse settlements scattered overLimerick, Kerry and Tipperary, organised as Irish clans and giving anIrish form to their names, maintained the inland trade. Other Munsterharbours were held, some by the Danes, some by the Irish.

At the end, therefore, of two hundred years of war, the Irish emergedwith their national life unbroken. Irish kingdoms had lived on side byside with Danish kingdoms; in spite of the strength of the Danishforces, the [70]constant irruptions of new Danes, and the businesscapacity of these fighters and traffickers, it was the Irish who weresteadily coming again to the top. Through all perils they had kepttheir old order. The high-kings had ruled without a break, and, exceptin a few years of special calamity, had held the national assembliesof the country at Telltown, not far from Tara. The tribesmen of thesub-kingdoms, if their ancient place of assembly had been turned intoa Danish fort, held their meeting in a hidden marsh or wood. Thus whenCashel was held by the Norsemen, the assembly met on a mound that rosein the marshy glen now called Glanworth. There Cellachan, the rightfulheir, in the best of arms and dress, demanded that the nobles shouldremember justice, while his mother declared his title and recited apoem. And when the champions of Munster heard these great words andthe speech of the woman, the tribes arose right readily to makeCellachan king. They set up his shout of king, and gave thanks to thetrue magnificent God for having found him. The nobles then came toCellachan and put [71]their hands in his hand, and placed the royaldiadem round his head, and their spirits were raised at the grandsight of him.

The English kings had made a further mistake. They proposed, likelater kings of Spain in South America, to exploit Ireland for thebenefit of the crown and the metropolis, not for the welfare of anyclass whatever of the inhabitants; the colonists were to be a meregarrison to conquer and hold the land for the king. But theAnglo-Norman adventurers had gone out to find profit for themselves,not to collect Irish wealth for London. Their "loyalty" failed underthat test. The kings, therefore, found themselves engaged in a doubleconflict, against the Irish and against their own colonists, and wereevery year more entangled in the difficulties of a policy false fromthe outset.

The Irish chiefs were also broken by guile and assassination. O'Brienwas separated from his people by a peerage (1543), an Englishinauguration without the ancient rites as head of his lands, and anEnglish guard of soldiers (1558). That house played no further part inthe Irish struggle.

The military difficulties of the Irish, [139]however, were such as tobaffle skill and courage. England had been drilled by the kings thatconquered her, and by the foreign wars she waged, into a powerfulmilitary nation by land and sea. Newly discovered gunpowder gave HenryVII the force of artillery. Henry VIII had formed the first powerfulfleet. The new-found gold of Brazil, the wealth of the Spanish main,had made England immensely rich. In this moment of growing strengththe whole might of Great Britain was thrown on Ireland, the smallerisland. The war, too, had a peculiar animosity; the fury of Protestantfanaticism was the cloak for the king's ambition, the resolve ofEnglish traders to crush Irish competition, the greed of prospectiveplanters. No motive was lacking to increase its violence. Ireland, onthe other hand, never conquered, and contemplating no conquest on herpart, was not organised as an aggressive and military nation. Hernational spirit was of another type. But whatever had been herorganisation it is doubtful whether any device could have saved herfrom the force of the English invasion. Dublin could never be closedfrom [140]within against enemies coming across the sea. The island was toosmall to give any means of escape to defeated armies while they werepreparing for a new defence. They could not disappear, for example,like the Dutch of the Cape Colony into vast desert regions which gavethem shelter while they built up a new state. Every fugitive withinthe circuit of Ireland could be presently found and hunted down. Thetribal system, too, which the Tudor sovereigns found, was no longer infull possession of Ireland; the defence was now carried on not by atribal Gaelic people but by a mixed race, half feudal and half tribalby tradition. But it was the old Irish inheritance of national freedomwhich gave to Ireland her desperate power of defence, so that it wasonly after such prodigious efforts of war and plantation that thebodies of her people were subdued, while their minds still remainedfree and unenslaved. 2351a5e196