chief, and was through him alone connected with the tribe. The responsibility for crime, which in the natural state of Irish society attached to the family or tribe, attached in the case of the fuidhir to the chief, who, in fact, became to this class of tenants that which their original tribesmen or kindred had been. Moreover, the land which they cultivated in their place of refuge was not theirs but his. They were the first tenants-at-will known to Ireland, and there is no doubt that they were always theoretically rackrentable.

"The three rents," says the "Senchus Mor," " are the rack-rent from a person of a strange tribe, a fair rent from one of the tribe, and the stipulated rent which is paid equally by the tribe and the strange tribe." The person from a strange tribe is undoubtedly the fuidhir, and though the Irish expression translated "rack-rent" cannot of course, in the ancient state of relation between population and land, denote an extreme competition rent, it certainly indicates an extreme rent, since in one of the glosses it is graphically compared to the milk of a cow, which is compelled to give. milk every month to the end of the year. ("Early Inst.," pp. 173175.)

The addition of these immigrant tenants more or less injured the interests of the tribe by the curtailment and otherwise of the waste land available for pasture; and Sir Henry alludes to an analogy be tween the tribesmen of the ancient Irish territory, and the migratory husbandman of modern India, who not only lost his hereditary position in his own village, but became an object of suspicion and dislike among the new community into which he had thrown himself.

But the power of the Irish chiefs was much increased by these fuidhir tenants, and their mingling with the

tribe led to much of the severity of the chiefs which was so frequently dwelt upon by Sir John Davies and Spenser. "They most shamefully racke their tenants," says Spenser, "laying upon them Coin and Lewy at pleasure, and exacting of them. besides his covenants what he pleaseth. So that the poore husbandman either dare not binde himself to him for longer tearme, or thinketh by his continuall liberty of change, to keepe his landlord the rather in awe from wronging of him."

Sir John Davies says, "The lord is an absolute tyrant, the tenant a very slave and villain, and in one respect more miserable than bondslaves. For commonly the bondslave is fed by his lord, but here the lord is fed by his bond-slave." The reason of all this is suggested by Sir Henry, as arising from the fuidhir class not being protected by the primitive institutions springing out of community of blood-by their not being of the tribe, but aliens, and so, losing their natural place in the kinship to which they belonged, they had no order of society to receive them.

The chief might protect the fuidhir from violent wrong, but the protection of family and tribe was wanting; the kinship of blood and race had no hold on him, he was simply a dependant on the will of the chief, and the obligations the chief might impose on him would ordinarily be of an oppressive character. Naturally he would be regarded by the tribe as an interloper, as one limiting or narrowing the available waste land, as competing with the settled tenant in the matter of rent, and so very materially affecting the old Saer and Daer tenants. The fuidhirs must have become what some of their descendants remain, "hewers of wood and drawers of water."

There are a number of topics

dealt with in this book of Sir Henry Maine which we cannot dwell upon, they are alike interesting and instructive; but we cannot conclude without observing that there is evidence in the early institutions of Ireland, long before the introduction of English law, that civilization had advanced and that anarchy and barbarism were not prevalent.

One remarkable feature in the ancient Irish life was the place women occupied in its industrial economy. In the Irish tracts they are spoken of as possessing property by marriage portions and gifts; they are capable of suing and being sued, and of entering into contracts independent of their husbands. They superintended and shared the work of the farm, and there is mention made of the wife of a chief of rank who had "the right to be consulted on every subject." Modern legisla

tion is bringing us back to this old Irish usage of placing women on something like an equality with their husbands.

The analogy pointed out between the Irish and Teutonic institutions of something like feudalism in the chief of a tribe becoming a lord of the territory is of some novelty; and the account of the fuidhir tenantry satisfactorily explains much of the serf dependence that has so long existed in Ireland between a landlord and his retainers.

This "History of the Early Institutions" is a fitting addition to the "Ancient Law," and the "Village Communities" of Sir Henry Maine, and strengthens what was said of the "Ancient Law" when first published, that if law lectures had exhibited no other result than its production, their establishment would have been amply justified.

W. H. F.