(N. W. T.)
CLAMECY, a town of central France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Nièvre, at the confluence of the Yonne and Beuvron and on the Canal du Nivernais, 46 m. N.N.E. of Nevers on the Paris-Lyon railway. Pop. (1906) 4455. Its principal building is the church of St Martin, which dates chiefly from the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. The tower and façade are of the 16th century. The chevet, which is surrounded by an aisle, is rectangular—a feature found in few French churches. Of the old castle of the counts of Nevers, vaulted cellars alone remain. A church in the suburb of Bethlehem, dating from the 12th and 13th centuries, now serves as part of an hotel. The public institutions include the sub-prefecture, tribunals of first instance and of commerce and a communal college. Among the industrial establishments are saw-mills, fulling-mills and flour-mills, tanneries and manufactories of boots and shoes and chemicals; and there is considerable trade in wine and cattle and in wood and charcoal, which is conveyed principally to Paris, by way of the Yonne.
In the early middle ages Clamecy belonged to the abbey of St Julian at Auxerre; in the 11th century it passed to the counts of Nevers, one of whom, Hervé, enfranchised the inhabitants in 1213. After the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1188, Clamecy became the seat of the bishops of Bethlehem, who till the Revolution resided in the hospital of Panthenor, bequeathed by William IV., count of Nevers. On the coup d’état of 1851 an insurrection broke out in the town, and was repressed by the new authorities with great severity.
CLAN (Gaelic clann, O. Ir. cland, connected with Lat. planta, shoot or scion, the ancient Gaelic or Goidelic substituting k for p), a group of people united by common blood, and usually settled in a common habitat. The clan system existed in Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland from early times. In its strictest sense the system was peculiar to those countries, but, in its wider meaning of a group of kinsmen forming a self-governing community, the system as represented by the village community has been shown by Sir H. Maine and others to have existed at one time or another in all lands.
Before the use of surnames and elaborate written genealogies, a tribe in its definite sense was called in Celtic a tuath, a word of wide affinities, from a root tu, to grow, to multiply, existing in all European languages. When the tribal system began to be broken up by conquest and by the rise of towns and of territorial government, the use of a common surname furnished a new bond for keeping up a connexion between kindred. The head of a tribe or smaller group of kindred selected some ancestor and called himself his Ua, grandson, or as it has been anglicized O’, e.g. Ua Conchobair (O’ Conor), Ua Suilleabhain (O’Sullivan). All his kindred adopted the same name, the chief using no fore-name however. The usual mode of distinguishing a person before the introduction of surnames was to name his father and grandfather, e.g. Owen, son of Donal, son of Dermot. This naturally led some to form their surnames with Mac, son, instead of Ua, grandson, e.g. MacCarthaigh, son of Carthach (MacCarthy), MacRuaidhri, son of Rory (Macrory). Both methods have been followed in Ireland, but in Scotland Mac came to be exclusively used. The adoption of such genealogical surnames fostered the notion that all who bore the same surname were kinsmen, and hence the genealogical term clann, which properly means the descendants of some progenitor, gradually became synonymous with tuath, tribe. Like all purely genealogical terms, clann may be used in the limited sense of a particular tribe governed by a chief, or in that of many tribes claiming descent from a common ancestor. In the latter sense it was synonymous with síl, siol, seed e.g. Siol Alpine, a great clan which included the smaller clans of the Macgregors, Grants, Mackinnons, Macnabs, Macphies, Macquarries and Macaulays.
The clan system in the most archaic form of which we have any definite information can be best studied in the Irish tuath, or tribe.[1] This consisted of two classes: (1) tribesmen, and (2) a miscellaneous class of slaves, criminals, strangers and their descendants. The first class included tribesmen by blood in the male line, including all illegitimate children acknowledged by their fathers, and tribesmen by adoption or sons of tribeswomen by strangers, foster-sons, men who had done some signal service to the tribe, and lastly the descendants of the second class after a certain number of generations. Each tuath had a chief called a ríg, king, a word cognate with the Gaulish ríg-s or rix, the Latin reg-s or rex, and the Old Norse rik-ir. The tribesmen formed a number of communities, each of which, like the tribe itself, consisted of a head, ceann fine, his kinsmen, slaves and other retainers. This was the fine, or sept. Each of these occupied a certain part of the tribe-land, the arable part being cultivated under a system of co-tillage, the pasture land co-grazed according to certain customs, and the wood, bog and mountains forming the marchland of the sept being the unrestricted common land of the sept. The sept was in fact a village community.
What the sept was to the tribe, the homestead was to the sept. The head of a homestead was an aire, a representative freeman capable of acting as a witness, compurgator and bail. These were very important functions, especially when it is borne in mind that the tribal homestead was the home of many of the kinsfolk of the head of the family as well as of his own children. The descent of property being according to a gavel-kind custom, it constantly happened that when an aire died the share of his property which each member of his immediate family was entitled to receive was not sufficient to qualify him to be an aire. In this case the family did not divide the inheritance, but remained together as “a joint and undivided family,” one of the members being elected chief of the family or household, and in this capacity enjoyed the rights and privileges of an aire. Sir H.S. Maine directed attention to this kind of family as an important feature of the early institutions of all Indo-European nations. Beside the “joint and undivided family,” there was another kind of family which we might call “the joint family.” This was a partnership composed of three or four members of a sept whose individual wealth was not sufficient to qualify each of them to be an aire, but whose joint wealth qualified one of the co-partners as head of the joint family to be one.
So long as there was abundance of land each family grazed its cattle upon the tribe-land without restriction; unequal increase of wealth and growth of population naturally led to its limitation, each head of a homestead being entitled to graze an amount of stock in proportion to his wealth, the size of his homestead, and his acquired position. The arable land was no doubt applotted annually at first; gradually, however, some of the richer families of the tribe succeeded in evading this exchange of allotments and converting part of the common land into an estate in sevralty. Septs were at first colonies of the tribe which settled on the march-land; afterwards the conversion of part of the common land into an estate in sevralty enabled the family that acquired it to become the parent of a new sept. The same process might, however, take place within a sept without dividing it; in other words, several members of the sept might hold part of the land of the sept as separate estate. The possession of land in sevralty introduced an important distinction into the tribal system—it created an aristocracy. An aire whose family held the same land for three generations was called a flaith, or lord, of which rank there were several grades according to their wealth in land and chattels. The aires whose wealth consisted in cattle only were called bó-aires, or cow-aires, of whom there were also several grades, depending on their wealth in stock. When a bó-aire had twice the wealth of the lowest class of flaith he might enclose part of the land adjoining his house as a lawn; this was the first step towards his becoming a flaith. The relations which subsisted between the flaiths and the bó-aires formed the most curious part of the Celtic tribal system, and throw a flood of light on the origin of the feudal system. Every tribesman without exception owed ceilsinne to the ríg, or chief, that is, he was bound to become his ceile, or vassal. This consisted in paying the ríg a tribute in kind, for which the ceile was entitled to receive a proportionate amount of stock without having to give any bond for their return, giving him service, e.g. in building his dun, or stronghold, reaping his harvest, keeping his roads clean and in repair, killing wolves, and especially service in the field, and doing him homage three times while seated every time he made his return of tribute. Paying the “calpe” to the Highland chiefs represented this kind of vassalage, a colpdach or heifer being in many cases the amount of food-rent paid by a free or saer ceile. A tribesman might, however, if he pleased, pay a higher rent on receiving more stock together with certain other chattels for which no rent was chargeable. In this case he entered into a contract, and was therefore a bond or daer ceile. No one need have accepted stock on these terms, nor could he do so without the consent of his sept, and he might free himself at any time from his obligation by returning what he had received, and the rent due thereon.