Suddenly, we are told of the og-aire that he has seven cows and a bull, seven pigs, seven sheep, and a horse. He also has a cow land, i.e. land to graze seven cows, for which a cow is paid every year by him to his chief. He has an ox, and a fourth part of the needful for ploughing: i.e. presumably he joins with others in making up a plough team of four oxen. Surely these have been supplied to him by his chief, as in the case of the Cymric ‘da.’ His proportionate stock (turcreicc) is eight cows, which with his land he gets from a bo-aire, possessed of surplus cattle, and he pays to him a food-rent ‘bes tigi’ (like the Welsh gwestva) of a cow and a pig, &c. Should his stock increase he does not always become at once a bo-aire, ‘because four or five such may occupy the land of a bo-aire, and it would not be easy for each of them to be a bo-aire’ (iv. pp. 305-309).
The ‘bo-aire.’
So in the same way a bo-aire has land of twice seven cumhals, and he has half of a full ploughing apparatus, and his proportionate stock (from his chief) is twelve cows; and a colpach heifer is his food-rent; and his honour-price is five seds.
A bo-aire may have a full and complete plough team and twenty cows and other things, and he may even rise to the giving of proportionate stock to tenants of his own if his stock should have grown too much for his land. But he still may remain a bo-aire. He may, however, rise from a bo-aire into a flaith (or chief), when he has double as much as an ‘aire desa’ and has established himself with a green round his homestead, and so surrounded his house with a precinct in which he can give protection to cattle taken in distress, this being one of the important duties and functions of a chief (flaith) (iv. pp. 309-317).
It would seem that even when a man had risen to be the chief of his kindred (fine) he might still be simply a bo-aire, and not necessarily yet a flaith chief.
In another tract, among other disconnected items are the following:—
Whatever number of the divisions of the bo-aires happen to be contending, though one of them be older than the others, the grade which is most wealthy, i.e. in point of wealth, it is it that takes precedence.
He is a hill of chieftainship in the third person.
Unless his father and grandfather were flaith, though he may be of the same race as to his origin, his chieftainship is lost to him.