In October 1600 Lord Deputy Mountjoy attempted to lead his army into Ulster via the Moyry Pass, a route strongly fortified and defended by the troops of Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone. According to the Annals of the Four Masters, O'Neill sent forth

In sixteenth-century Ireland, few soldiers and commanders who served for any length of time escaped being wounded; neither could they escape wounding others. Those snatches of combat that are recorded in the Irish annals, State Papers and other sources routinely tell of flesh-piercing, bone-crunching encounters.

Reading wounds

The late Elizabethan Irish wars generated a growing level of violence between soldiers and towards civilians. Casualty levels were increased by mindsets that characterised enemies as ‘Irish rebels’ or ‘English churls’, and that legitimised atrocity as a means of dealing with opposition cheaply and definitively. Advances in tactics and weapons had a significant impact on the means of killing and wounding by the end of the sixteenth century: the large numbers of gunshot wounds reported in the State Papers in the 1590s provides one indication of how warfare in Ireland had been affected by the spread of the ‘military revolution’. James O'Neill's research on the Nine Years War demonstrates how Tyrone had modernised his army, creating a ‘hybrid force that combined the advantages of modern firepower-oriented infantry with the flexible and highly mobile nature of Irish warfare’. Though more were in possession of firearms, soldiers still also relied on standard weapons like pikes, swords and the ‘horseman's staff’, a wooden staff that might be tipped with metal. The Irish also fought with javelins (‘darts’), bows and their long knives known as scians.