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SCANDINAVIAN ANTIQUITIES OP DUBLIN. 185
Ostmen may have acknowledged their conqueror, B<
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and the Norman barons their feudal lord, yet that
any Irish chieftain who came to the meeting and
took part in the ceremony (except possibly those of
Leinster) supposed that he thereby " did yield him-
self to King Henry," as Cambrensis says, is rendered
more than doubtful by the facts disclosed.
It is manifest that Henry
himself had no idea NO submission
that he had been elected king of Ireland by the the Irish chiefs,
chiefs assembled at the Thingmote or that they had
yielded to him dominion over the country. The
most diligent research has not discovered a single
charter, granted by him in Ireland or in England
(not even in that by which he granted to his men
of Bristol his new gotten city of Dublin), nor a
single instance in any other record in which he has
styled himself " King " or even " Lord of Ireland "
although he rarely if ever omitted his minor titles
of Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and Count of
Anjou. While he remained in Ireland he exercised
no legal prerogative except over that territory the
royalty of which Strongbow had surrendered to him,
and over that from which the Ostmen enemies of
Dermot M'Morrough had been driven, and where it
was indifferent to the Irish, whether the Ostmen or
the Anglo-Normans were the rulers. The only laws
he made were for his English subjects' and for the
[' In the confusion of races that personal,
each race in actions
followed the irruption of the between one another, being rulrd
northern barbarians, and intro- by its own code : Thus Roman,
duced the feudal system, the laws Frank, Burgundian, had each his
administered were not territorial law. (See Robertson, Hist, of
as in more modern times, but Charles V., Von Savigny on