Besides, they lived in villages, which were certainly surrounded by woods, because the woods were everywhere, and they furnished the inhabitants with fuel and shelter, as well as materials for building their huts.
But further on this able author expresses himself much more in accordance with the truth of history, when he states that the 'Irish enemy' was no _nation_ in the modern sense of the word, but a race divided into many nations or tribes, _separately_ defending their lands from the English barons in the immediate neighbourhood.
There had been no ancient national government displaced, no dynasty overthrown; the Irish had _no national flag_, nor any capital city as the metropolis of their common country, nor any common administration of law.' He might have added that they had no _mint_.

There never was an Irish king who had his face stamped on a coin of his realm.

Some stray pieces of money found their way into the country from abroad, but up to the close of the sixteenth century the rudest form of barter prevailed in Ulster, and accounts were paid not in coins but in cows.
Even the mechanical arts which had flourished in the country before the arrival of the Celts had gradually perished, and had disappeared at the time of the English invasion.

Any handy men could build a house of mud and wattles.

Masons, carpenters, smiths, painters, glaziers, &c., were not wanted by a people who despised stone buildings as prisons, and abhorred walled towns as sepulchres.