The Danes Crushed

Brian had still some military work to do before his people could consider themselves free from the enterprises of the Danes. The Danish residents in Ireland began to chafe at the subordinate position to which Brian had reduced them, and they kept up a constant communication with their kinsmen and friends in the North. The result was that another expedition from the Danish shores was organized against Ireland, and a great fleet, as fleets were then, was sent to make war upon the new Irish Sovereign. Brian was now sinking into age—he had had some twelve years of peaceful reign—but he showed that the courage and capacity of his earlier days had not deserted him. He roused the whole country to a determined resistance. He took command himself. He encountered the Danish army at Clontarf on the Good Friday of 1014, and inflicted on them a defeat so crushing that it put an end to all likelihood of further Danish invasion.