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Updated: May 26, 2025
The Irish Kernes some fifteen hundred of whom were among the auxiliaries were better off, for they habitually dispensed with clothing; an apron from waist to knee being the only protection of these wild Kelts, who fought with the valour, and nearly, in the costume of Homeric heroes.
Goaded by hunger and distress of every kind, those formidable and ferocious "wood kernes" only paid the country back, by inflicting on it that plunder and devastation which they had received at its hands.
The night which followed Colonel Sullivan's arrest was a night long remembered at Morristown a night to uplift the sanguine and to kindle the short-sighted; nor was it a wonder that the young chief as he strode among his admiring tenants, his presence greeted, when he entered, with Irish acclamations, and his skirts kissed, when he passed, by devoted kernes sniffed the pleasing incense, and trod the ground to the measure of imagined music.
A recurrence to the former favourite policy signalized the year 1357, when a new set of ordinances were received from London, denouncing the penalties of treason against all who intermarried, or had relations of fosterage with the Irish; and proclaiming war upon all kernes and idle men found within the English districts.
It was no longer a struggle, as of old, of Celt against Saxon, but of Catholic against Protestant. The Papists within the Pale joined hands in it with the wild kernes outside the Pale. When the governing body of the rebels met at Kells in the following spring they called themselves "Confederate Catholics," resolved to defend "the public and free exercise of the true and Catholic Roman religion."
The Irish Kernes some fifteen hundred of whom were among the auxiliaries were better off, for they habitually dispensed with clothing; an apron from waist to knee being the only protection of these wild Kelts, who fought with the valour, and nearly, in the costume of Homeric heroes.
The Irish kernes too, were allowed to come to mass within the city, and were received there with as much fraternity by, the Catholic soldiers of Tassis as the want of any common dialect would allow a proceeding which seemed better perhaps for the salvation of their souls, than for the advancement of the siege.
But others took their places: the wild hawks as thick as seagulls flashing over the waves, fair wind or foul, laughing at pursuit, brave, reckless, devoted, the crews the strangest medley: English from the Devonshire and Cornish creeks, Huguenots from Rochelle; Irish kernes with long skenes, 'desperate, unruly persons with no kind of mercy.
Will Tityre tu patulae, as they ca' it, tell him where Rashleigh Osbaldistone is? or Macbeth, and all his kernes and galla-glasses, and your awn to boot, Rob, procure him five thousand pounds to answer the bills which fall due ten days hence, were they a' rouped at the Cross, basket-hilts, Andra-Ferraras, leather targets, brogues, brochan, and sporrans?"
The wreckers of the Orkneys and the Faroes, the clansmen of the Scottish Isles, the kernes of Donegal and Galway, all had their part in the work of murder and robbery. Eight thousand Spaniards perished between the Giant's Causeway and the Blaskets. On a strand near Sligo an English captain numbered eleven hundred corpses which had been cast up by the sea.
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