Much talk there was of his coming, and of his strange companions that are not wont to be the friends of man, and as the lad grew in comeliness and in knowledge the eyes of all were turned to him more and more, because the rule of mac Con was not good.
So the time wore on, till one day a case came for judgment before the King, in which the Queen sued a certain wealthy woman and an owner of herds named Benna, for that the sheep of Benna had strayed into the Queen's fields and had eaten to the ground a crop of woad[26] that was growing there.

The King gave judgment, that the sheep which had eaten the woad were to be given to the Queen in compensation for what they had destroyed.

Then Cormac rose up before the people and said, "Nay, but let the wool of the sheep, when they are next shorn, be given to the Queen, for the woad will grow again and so shall the wool." "A true judgment, a true judgment," cried all the folk that were present in the place; "a very king's son is he that hath pronounced it." And they murmured so loudly against mac Con that his druids counselled him to quit Tara lest a worse thing befall him.

So he gave up the sovranty to Cormac and went southward into Munster to rally his friends there and recover the kingdom, and there he was slain by Cormac's men as he was distributing great largesse of gold and silver to his followers, in the place called The Field of the Gold.
[26] Woad is a cruciferous plant, _Isatis tinctoria_, used for dyeing.
So Cormac, son of Art, ruled in Tara and was High King of all Ireland.
And the land, it is said, knew its rightful lord, and yielded harvests such as never were known, while the forest trees dripped with the abundance of honey and the lakes and rivers were alive with fish.

So much game was there, too, that the folk could have lived on that alone and never put a ploughshare in the soil.