They lived in Donegal, under the protection of O'Donel, but they showed themselves quite willing to do full justice to his great rival O'Neill.

The presence of the lord deputy, the Earl of Ormond, and other great men at Armagh, with a select English army, would naturally have roused their attention, and when that army was encountered and vanquished in the open field by the Irish general, we should have expected that the details of such a glorious event would have been collected with the greatest care from the accounts of eye-witnesses.

The bards and historiographers should have been on the alert to do justice to their country on so great an occasion.

They were on the spot, they were beside the victors, and they had no excuse whatever for ignorance.

Yet here is the miserably cold, _jejune_, feeble, and imperfect record which we find in the Annals of the Four Masters:--'The Lord Justice of Ireland, namely Thomas Fitzwalter (Sussex), marched into Tyrone to take revenge for the capture of Caloach O'Donel, and also for his own quarrels with the country.
He encamped with a great army at Armagh, and constructed deep entrenchments and impregnable ramparts about the great church of Armagh, which he intended to keep constantly guarded.