the attempt to tax the Argyle Colony. The question between
Ossory and Tara, we may pass over as of obsolete interest,
but the other two deserve fuller mention:

The Bards--who were the Editors, Professors, Registrars
and Record-keepers--the makers and masters of public
opinion in those days, had reached in this reign a number
exceeding 1,200 in Meath and Ulster alone. They claimed
all the old privileges of free quarters on their travels
and freeholdings at home, which were freely granted to
their order when it was in its infancy. Those chieftains
who refused them anything, however extravagant, they
lampooned and libelled, exciting their own people and
other princes against them. Such was their audacity, that
some of them are said to have demanded from King Hugh
the royal brooch, one of the most highly prized heirlooms
of the reigning family. Twice in the early part of this
reign they had been driven from the royal residence, and
obliged to take refuge in the little principality of
Ulidia (or Down); the third time the monarch had sworn
to expel them utterly from the kingdom. In Columbkill,
however, they were destined to find a most powerful
mediator, both from his general sympathy with the Order,
being himself no mean poet, and from the fact that the
then Arch-Poet, or chief of the order, Dallan Forgaill,
was one of his own pupils.

To settle this vexed question of the Bards, as well as
to obtain the sanction of the estates to the taxation of
Argyle, King Hugh called a General Assembly in the year