Sir,—In his review in the last issue of HI (Spring 1996) of Colony and Frontier in Medieval Ireland Adrian Empey quotes what purports to be a sentence from my paper published therein: ‘For some reason or other, never satisfactorily explained, de Courcy’s army passed through Louth without so much as lopping off a head’ and adds: ‘I think one can be more precise’. The nerve! The actual sentence (p.3) is: ‘But for some reason or other, never satisfactorily explained, de Courcy and his band of twenty or so knights and 300 men marched straight through this as yet unconquered and vulnerable territory [Louth] and headed instead for Down (now Downpatrick), capital of the kingdom of Ulaid, which after a march of three days and nights, they reached, overcame and conquered’. Adrian’s sentence, I’m sure your readers will agree, while succinct and full of pith, is only a distant cousin of the (admittedly rather long-winded) sentence he claims to quote. Which of us needs to be more precise?—Yours etc.,
SEÁN DUFFY
Department of Medieval History
Trinity College,
Dublin 2.