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on five or six places of which only were they ever able to make 
settlements of any considerable duration. They were, therefore, 
unable to impose laws on the Irish in those districts where their 
power did not extend, and these districts comprised the major part 
of the entire kingdom; and the hatred, which the natives bore to 
those foreigners, would prevent them from making a voluntary adop- 
tion of their customs or laws. Hence it may be concluded, that 
the invasion of Ireiand by those Northerns could have little or no 
influence on the ancient and long established laws of the nation, or 
on the manners and customs of the inhabitants; so that, whatever 
were the laws of Ireland on the arrival of those barbarians, they re- 
mained unaltered at the period of their extirpation. 
We have now, it is presumed, satisfactorily shown, that the inva- 
sion of Ireland, by the Danes and Norwegians, could have caused 
no variation in the ancient laws of the country ; and that, with the 
exception of the trifling influence, which the introduction of the Chris- 
tian religion might have had on the national institutions, the Irish 
laws must have remained as they were originally established by the 
natives. It remains still to inquire how far those laws may have 
been influenced by the domination of the English in this island, 
from their first invasion in the year 1169, to the commencement of 
the reign of James the First, in the beginning of the seventeenth 
century. 
In the year 1167, Dermod M‘Morogh, King of Leinsier, of de- 
testable memory, having, for crimes of the blackest atrocity commit- 
ted by him, been expelled from his kingdom, by the united forces of 
Conaught and Meath, to which were also joined those of the 
Danes of Dublin, fled to Henry the Second King of England, then 
in France, to implore his assistance in the recovery of his kingdom. 
To induce the English king to comply with his request, he offered to 
