The Irish tribal system in an earlier stage than the Welsh.
Returning now to the main object of the inquiry we seem, in the perhaps to some extent superficial and too simple view taken by Sir John Davies of the Irish tribal arrangements, to have found what we sought—to have got a glimpse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of an earlier stage in the working of the tribal system than we get in Wales nearly 1,000 years earlier. In this stage the land in theory was still in tribal ownership, its redistribution among the tribesmen [p230] was still frequent, and arable agriculture was still subordinate to pasture. Lastly, the arithmetical clustering of the homesteads was the natural method by which the frequent redistributions of the land were made easy; while the run-rig form of the open-field system was the natural mode of conducting a co-operative and shifting agriculture.
But whilst gaining this step, and resting upon it for our present purpose, we must not be blind to the fact that in another way the Irish system had become more developed and more complex than the Welsh.
Sir John Davies sometimes dwells upon the fact that the chief was in no true sense the lord of the county, and the tribesmen in no true sense the freeholders of the land. The land belonged to the tribe. But, as we have seen, he found also that, as in Wales, the chiefs and sub-chiefs had, as a matter of fact, rightly or wrongly, gradually acquired a permanent occupation of a certain portion of land—so many townlands—which, using the English manorial phrase, he speaks of as 'in demesne.' Upon these the chief's immediate followers, and probably bondservants, lived, like the Welsh taeogs, paying him food-rents or tribute very much resembling those of the taeogs.
The complications described in the Brehon Laws.
This land, as we have seen, he calls 'mensal land,' probably translating an Irish term; and we are reminded at once of the Welsh taeog-land in the Register trevs, which also, from the gifts of food, was called in one of the Welsh laws 'mensal land.'
Further, besides these innovations upon the ancient simplicity of the tribal system, there had evidently, and perhaps from early times, grown up artificial relationships, founded upon contract, or even [p231] fiction, which, so to speak, ran across and complicated very greatly the tribal arrangements resting upon blood relationship. This probably is what makes the Brehon laws so bewildering and apparently inconsistent with the simplicity of the tribal system as in its main features it presented itself to Sir John Davies.
The loan of cattle by those tribesmen (Boaires) who had more than enough to stock their proper share of the tribe land to other tribesmen who had not cattle enough to stock theirs, in itself introduced a sort of semi-feudal, or perhaps semi-commercial dependence of one tribesman upon another. Tribal equality, or rather gradation of rank according to blood relationship, thus became no doubt overlaid or crossed by an actual inequality, which earlier or later developed in some sense into an irregular form of lordship and service. Hence the complicated rules of 'Saer' and 'Daer' tenancy. There were perhaps also artificial modes of introducing new tribesmen into a sept without the blood relationship on which the tribal system was originally built. These complications may be studied in the Brehon laws, as they have been studied by Sir Henry Maine and Mr. Skene, and the learned editors of the 'Laws' themselves; but, however ancient may be the state of things which they describe, they need not detain us here, or prevent our recognising in the actual conditions described by Sir John Davies the main features of an earlier stage of the system than is described in the ancient Welsh laws.
II. THE TRIBAL SYSTEM IN ITS EARLIER STAGES.
The comparison of the Gaelic and Cymric tribal systems has shown resemblances so close in leading [p232] principles, that we may safely seek to obtain from some of the differences between them a glimpse into earlier stages of the tribal system than the Welsh evidence, taken alone, would have opened to our view.