The notoriety of Colonel Humphrey Gilbert's 1569 campaign in Munster is beyond dispute. The stark image of rebels forced to submit to Gilbert by shuffling on their knees through an avenue marked by the decapitated heads of their loved ones (as described by Thomas Churchyard in his general rehearsal of warres) will never lose its power to shock. But even Churchyard, writing ten years after the event, seems to have realised that Gilbert's flamboyant conduct begged some questions, hence the quickness with which he offered a list of explanations and justifications for his subject's behaviour. First, he turned the charge of cruelty back against the Irish, stating that Gilbert ‘did but then begin that order with them, which they had in effect ever tofore used toward the English’. Next, he vindicated the Colonel's approach by pointing to its positive results: the widespread fear that these actions engendered ensured that more forts were surrendered to him in one day ‘than by strong hand would have been won in a year’. Gilbert's most outrageous actions – the grisly carneval of the decapitations, for instance – were motivated, we are told, ‘ad terrorem, the dead feeling nothing the more pains thereby: and yet did it bring great terror to the people when they saw the heads of their dead fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolk and friends, lie on the ground before their faces’.