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Sometimes the plunderers fell in with parties of militia or with detachments from the English garrisons, in situations in which disguise, flight and resistance were alike impossible. When this happened every kerne who was taken was hanged, without any ceremony, on the nearest tree.
The two divisions of the Irish infantry were the galloglass, or heavily armed foot soldier, called gall, either as a mercenary, or from having been equipped after the Norman method, and the kerne, or light infantry. The horsemen were men of the free tribes, who followed their chief on terms almost of equality, and who, except his immediate retainers, equipped and foraged for themselves.
There were thus quartered in Ulster at this period the 4,000 foot and 400 horse under Dowcra, chiefly on the Foyle, with whatever companies of Kerne adhered to Arthur O'Neil and Nial Garve; with Chichester in Carrickfergus there were 850 foot and 150 horse; with Danvers in Armagh, 750 foot and 100 horse; in Mount Norris, under Sir Samuel Bagnal, 600 foot and 50 horse; in and about Downpatrick, lately taken by the Deputy, under Moryson, 300 foot; in Newry, under Stafford, 400 foot and 50 horse; in Charlemont, with Williams, 300 foot and 50 horse; or, in all, of English regulars in Ulster alone, 7,000 foot and 800 horse.
More than one ship lay long in the bay of Carrickfergus heaped with carcasses, and exhaling the stench of death, without a living man on board, The Irish army suffered much less. The kerne of Munster or Connaught was dune as well off in the camp as if he had been in his own mud cabin inhaling the vapours of his own quagmire.
The Colonel, though he masked his apprehensions under an impenetrable firmness, began to fear no less than that and with cause. He observed that O'Sullivan Og's followers were of the lowest type of kerne, islanders in all probability, and half starved; men whose hands were never far from their skenes, and whose one orderly instinct consisted in a blind obedience to their chief.
We had lunch there, at a hotel where I should love to stay, and then passed on, along a perfect road, down the Wye, till we came to Kerne Bridge, near Goodrich Castle. There we got out, leaving Buddha as the god in the car, and walked for half a mile along a romantic path to the ruined castle.
Sir Henry Sidney had admitted these pretensions, partly as a menace against the Kavanaghs and Geraldines, and Sir Peter established himself at Leighlin, where he kept great house, with one hundred servants, over one hundred kerne, forty horse, a stall in his stable, a seat at his board for all comers.
The number of the Irish troops who had landed on our shores might justly excite serious apprehensions as to the King's ulterior designs; but it was magnified tenfold by the public apprehensions. It may well be supposed that the rude kerne of Connaught, placed, with arms in his hands, among a foreign people whom he hated, and by whom he was hated in turn, was guilty of some excesses.
In this march they were closely pursued by the Earl of Desmond, either in earnest or in sham, and were obliged to separate into three small bands, the brothers of the Earl retiring respectively to the fastnesses of Lymnamore and Glenfesk, while Fitzmaurice, with "a dozen horsemen and a few kerne," made a desperate push to reach the western side of the Shannon, where he hoped, perhaps, for better opportunity and a warmer reception.
Accompanied with the number of sixty or eighty horsemen, and about three hundred kerne and gallowglass, the traitor came to the town of Trim, and there not only robbed the same, but also burnt a great part thereof, and took all the cattle of the country thereabouts; and after that assaulted Dunboyne, within six miles to Dublin; and the inhabitants of the town defending themselves by the space of two days, and sending for succour to Dublin ... in default of relief, he utterly destroyed and burnt the whole town.
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