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CHAPTER XV
RECLAIMING THE ENGLISH TRIBES
i. English Ignorance of Debt Owed to Irishmen. 2. Conversion of
English Delayed by Neglect. 3. Reputation of English Aborigines
among Civilized Peoples. 4. Total Helplessness of the Barbarians.
i. ENGLISH IGNORANCE OF DEBT OWED TO IRISHMEN
LYNCH
in his "Cambrensis Eversus" 1
remarks with
wonder on the general ignorance in England con-
cerning the debt that country owed to Irishmen,
since the story of how they gave Christianity and civiliza-
tion to the English is so plainly told in Bede. The remark,
made in the seventeenth century, might be repeated in
the twentieth. It is certainly a matter for enduring won-
der that with the pages of Bede lying before their eyes
so many English historians should have been tempted to
depict ancient Ireland as a barbarian land in comparison
with their own. Many .English writers indeed have not
scrupled to go further and with bland temerity have
endeavored to propagate the notion that it was the
English who first brought civilization to Irishmen. Of
such writers the legion will be forgotten, and with such
as are remembered posterity and the facts will deal
according to their deserts. Bede was the first as he has
remained the decentest of English historians. Nearly a
thousand years were to pass after his time before England
was able to produce a school of historians writing in their
i Chapters XVI, XVII and XVIII of this work, first published in Latin in
1662, has a good account of the manner in which the Irish missionaries
converted the English natives. The work was republished in three volumes
with a translation by Matthew Kelly in 1848.
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