returned in the same track for several successive
seasons--were very many of those venerated men, the third
and fourth generation of the Abbots and Bishops. The
Munster King, and many of the chieftain class shared the
common lot. Lastly, the royal brothers fell themselves
victims to the epidemic, which so sadly signalizes their
reign.

The only conflicts that occurred on Irish soil with a
Pictish or an Anglo-Saxon force--if we except those who
formed a contingent of Congal's army at Moira--occurred
in the time of the hospitable Finnacta. The Pictish force,
with their leaders, were totally defeated at Rathmore,
in Antrim (A.D. 680), but the Anglo-Saxon expedition
(A.D. 684) seems not to have been either expected or
guarded against. As leading to the mention of other
interesting events, we must set this inroad clearly
before the reader.

The Saxons had now been for four centuries in Britain,
the older inhabitants of which--Celts like the Gauls and
Irish--they had cruelly harassed, just as the Milesian
Irish oppressed their Belgic predecessors, and as the
Normans, in turn, will be found oppressing both Celt and
Saxon in England and Ireland. Britain had been divided
by the Saxon leaders into eight separate kingdoms, the
people and princes of several of which were converted to
Christianity in the fifth, sixth, and seventh century,
though some of them did not receive the Gospel before
the beginning of the eighth. The Saxons of Kent and the