It was after one of these raids in 1580 that the poet Spencer wrote: The people were brought to such wretchedness that any strong heart would have rued the same.

Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came, creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs would not bear them.
They looked like anatomies of death; they spoke like ghosts crying out of their graves.

They did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could find them; yea and one {348} another soon after, inasmuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot of watercresses or shamrocks, there they thronged as to a feast for a time.
The Irish chiefs were not to be tamed by either kindness or force.
Henry and Elizabeth scattered titles of "earl" and "lord" among the O's and Macs of her western island, only to find that the coronet made not the slightest difference in either their affections or their manners.
They still lived as marauding chiefs, surrounded by wild kerns and gallowglasses fighting each other and preying on their own poor subjects.

"Let a thousand of my people die," remarked one of them, Neil Garv, "I pass not a pin.

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