ANCIENT CELTIC TENURES.

BY H. C. MACANDREW, PROVOST OF INVERNESS.

IN the earliest condition of our race of which we have any knowledge, the only bond of union between men was blood relationship. Every man was to every other a blood relation or an enemy. The earliest political organisation was the tribe, a number of families. associated together for defence and other purposes, and bound together by their belief in a common ancestor. When, however, the tribe ceased to be a wandering body, and settled on some fixed and defined area as its permanent residence, and still more when it ceased to be entirely pastoral, and commenced to till the land, it is obvious that a new relation of man to man was created, and the foundation laid of a great revolution in the idea as to what constituted the bond of social and political union. How great a revolution has taken place we may see when we consider how, in civilised communities, common residence in the same place has come to be regarded as almost the only foundation of political organisation-when we consider, for instance, the readiness with which the crowds of various races who are annually pouring into the United States become Americans. The tribal or race idea. has, however, always died hard, as we shall see later on when we come to consider the condition of the Scottish Highlands-and in Eastern and Central Europe, it is a question of moment at the present time whether the inhabitants are not to break up into new states and associate themselves according to real or supposed community of race.

The relation which a people once settled on, and permanently occupying land, bore to that land, and the change which the mode of the use and occupation of it produced in their relations to each other, and in their social and political organisation, must always be questions of the greatest interest to the student of history. And there is nothing that strikes one more than the circumstance that the further we trace back the history of the various families of the Aryan race, the stronger becomes the similarity of their laws and customs, the stronger the evidence that they are a common family. Whether in the Hindoo

village community of the present day we see an organisation to which our remote ancestors were accustomed before they left the cradle of the race and the traditions of which they carried with them in their wanderings, is a question which cannot yet be answered; but it certainly is very remarkable how, in all families of the race, communities remarkably similar uniformly developed themselves. To trace any of the land systems of the European nations to their source, and to consider their relations to each other, is, however, a subject too wide for this paper, and what I purpose to do at present is to consider the system of land tenure in this country and in Ireland at the time when we first have any authentic history of these countries, to endeavour to describe the stage at which it had then arrived, and to glance shortly at the survivals of the system which we still have in our own country. This enquiry, limited as it is, is especially interesting on these grounds, that long after the contact of the Saxons with the Roman organisation, which they found in England, had produced the manorial system, and after the fusion of the Roman and barbarian systems on the Continent had produced the feudal system, Scotia, as Ireland was then called, and Albyn remained almost entirely unaffected by any foreign influence, and continued to develop in their own way, and that there remains to us a great body of the customary law of the peoples which inhabited! these countries.

At the time of which I write, Ireland and Scotland (Scotland or Albyn at that time being the country north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde) were inhabited by two races-the Picts and the Scots. The Picts inhabited all Scotland and the North of Ireland, and the Scots the rest of Ireland-there being, probably in both countries, and certainly in Ireland, considerable survivals of earlier races. I accept the theory that both these peoples were of kindred race, and that they spoke dialects of the same language. This I know is disputed, but whether it is true or not, I think that there can be no doubt that at the time the Irish were converted to Christianity the people of the two countries had much intercourse, and the same political and social organisation; and I accept the picture of that organisation as given in the Brehon Laws as equally applicable to both.

The Brehon Laws are singularly interesting and valuable, in

as much as they profess to be not a system of law enacted by a legislature, but a record of the customary law of the people handed down from the remotest antiquity. They are called the Brehon Laws, because they were preserved and administered by a hereditary caste of lawyers called Brehons, who seem to have taken the place in Christian times which the Druids occupied in heathen times, and who were the judges and arbitrators of the tribes. What we know of these laws is derived from a number of manuscript tracts preserved in various libraries in Ireland, and a number of which have recently been translated and published. None of the manuscripts are older, I believe, than the 13th century, but as they all give the text of the laws followed by glosses, commentaries, and explanations, it is evident that the laws are older than the manuscripts. The most important of the tracts which has been published is the Seanchus Mòr, and in it it is stated that the laws which it contains were compiled and written down in the time of St Patrick, and there can be no doubt that these tracts represent the customary law of the people as it existed at or about the time of the introduction of Christianity. They continued to be the law of Ireland beyond the pale, until they were abrogated by a decision of the Irish Supreme Court in the time of James the Sixth of Scotland and First of England and Ireland.

These laws nowhere contain any description of a system of land tenure, and what the system of land rights was which existed at the time they represent is only to be gathered from what may be almost called incidental references. These are not at all times easily to be reconciled, and accordingly very opposite opinions have been formed as to the state of matters represented. Some writers contend that under these laws the land continued the common property of the tribe, and was periodically divided among the free tribesmen; others maintain that they exhibit a state of things in which there existed all the elements of the Feudal System, while others, and I think correctly, hold that they represent society as in a transition state, the customs represented in some of the tracts being older than those represented in others.

The political unit, according to these laws, was the tuath. This word originally, I believe, meant a tribe, and afterwards it

came to mean the territory possessed and occupied by a tribe. Over the tuath in Ireland was the Ri-tuath or king. Next above the tuath was the Mòr-tuath or great tuath, embracing several tuaths, with its Ri-Mor-tuath. Above that the provincial king, and over him the Ard-righ, or supreme king of Ireland. In Scotland the ruler of the tuath was called the Toseich or Toiseach, the next in rank above him was the Mormaer ruling a province, and above these were the kings of the northern and southern Picts, ruling, the one at Inverness and the other at Scone.

It is in the internal organisation of the tuath, however, that, as might be expected, we find traces of the actual relation of the tribesmen to the land. And when we examine this, we find the tribe divided into a number of grades or ranks, the Fer-midba, or lowest grade of free tribesmen; the Bo-aires or cow-lords, of whom there were several classes, and whose rank was derived from their wealth in cattle; the Aire-desa, of whom also there were several grades, whose rank was derived from the possession of land, up to the tanist, or elected successor to the king, and the king himself. The office of king was not hereditary, the law which regulated it being that of tanistry. By this law or custom a successor was always elected to the king in his lifetime, and was called the tanist. To each of these there was apportioned a part of the tribe land as deis or mensal land, and this land always passed to their successors undivided. Here, then, is a first indication of separate property in land and succession to it, although at first at least the title was official. The Aire-desa, as I have said, took their rank from the possession of deis or property in land. They were of the same grade or class as the king and tanist, being chiefs or flaths, and the distinctions in rank among them consisted in the number of ceile or tenants whom they had on their land. Thus the Aire-desa simply, or lowest grade, had ten ceiles, five bond and five free, while the Aire-forgaile, who ranked next to the tanist, had forty ceiles, twenty bond and twenty free. The Bo-aire possessed a house and homestead, and he seems also to have had a certain definite portion of land allotted to him, for it is stated that when a Bo-aire possessed the land which had been possessed by his father and his grandfather, then he became an Aire-desa. The relation which these Aires bore to their tenants seems to have been as follows-and it strongly indicates to what

an extent the ideas arising out of the purely pastoral state of the tribe still existed:-In addition to giving to his ceiles the use of land, the Aire or Flath also gave them a stock of cattle, and for these they rendered certain services and homage, and in the case of bond tenants, paid him in kind a food-rent, and the number of cattle which he gave to his ceiles; and the foodrent and services which he received from them in return, were regulated according to the rank of the Aire. What the exact distinction between the free ceiles and the bond ceiles was it is very difficult to learn. It was probably this, that the free ceile had stock of his own, as well as the stock which he received from his chief, and could terminate the contract with his chief at any time; while, on the other hand, the bond ceile received all his stock from the chief, and was bound at least for a certain number of years. It seems clear, however, that the bond ceile was a tribesman, and had certain tribal rights, and was in no sense a serf or bound to the soil. Of serfdom, or villenage, as it existed in England, and afterwards in the portions of Scotland which submitted to Saxon customs, there appears to be no trace in Celtic law.

In addition to the ceiles or tribal tenants, there were two other classes who appear to have lived on the land of the chiefs in a state of more or less dependence-the cottars or Bothacks, and the Fuidir. The former appear to have been poor tribesmen, and the latter were broken men and strangers from other tribes whom the chiefs took into their service and settled on their land as tenants-at-will. The service required of them, and their condition, is thus described:-"A Fuidir tenant is of this kindhowever great the thing may be which is required of him, he must render it, or return the stock or quit the land, and however long he may have been in the service he must quit the land at length." Even this class, however, after nine generations, became free, and entitled to the rights of tribesmen. In the case of the flaths or chiefs, the contracting of the relation of ceileship was voluntary, but in the case of the Ri or King it was not. Every tribesman-even the flath-was bound to take stock from his king, and thus to become bound to do him service and homage; and the Ri-tuath was bound to take it from the Ri-Mòrtuath, and so upwards; and in some tuaths we are told that