close corporation of the kindred family develops into the close corporation of the trading guild, we find this practice of mutual sharing of contracts transferred to the traders.

The Simplicity of the Communal Society.-In very marked contrast with this elaboration of contract law was the primeval simplicity of all this ancient society, its unrestrained enjoyment of the coarser pleasures, the simplicity of its occupations, the perpetual drunkenness, especially among the Norsemen, its avoidance of the comparative self-restraint and attention to external refinement which the Norman and Angevin kings imitated at some distance from the gorgeous ceremony of the East, which they borrowed from the Crusades. Its coarseness and primitive conditions come down to us in many picturesque little touches in the Welsh and Irish customary law and the Orkney Sagas.

To give a few instances:

The occupations in the corus law of a king, given in the Crithgabhlach, 37 are very likely an apocryphal report of an ancient tradition, but they are consistent with a good deal which we know of this early society-Sunday for drinking ale, for he is not a lawful chief who does not distribute ale every Sunday (the possession of casks and caldrons for ale is mentioned several times as forming part of a chief's possessions); Monday for judgment for the adjustment of the people (the manorial court); Tuesday at chess; Wednesday seeing greyhounds coursing; Thursday at marriage duties; Friday at horse-racing; Saturday at giving judgments.

The footholder of the Welsh kings, an hereditary officer, who holds the king's feet at the banquet until the king goes to sleep, eats from the same dish with the king, with his back to the fire; 38 the judge of the Court has for his pillow at night the cushion on which the king sits during the day; 39 the queen's priest has the clothes in which the queen should do penance during Lent, 40 and her handmaid, who has her land free and her horse in attendance, has the queen's old clothes, her old shifts, her old bed-linen, her old bands, her old bridles, her old shoes, and her old saddles.41

Sweyn, Aslief's son, the Viking, who in 1157-58 attacked and killed Somerled, 42 is described: "Sweyn had in the

spring hard work, and made them lay down very much seed and looked much after it himself. But when that toil was ended he fared away every spring on a Viking voyage, and harried about among the Southern Isles and Ireland, and came home after midsummer" to reap and store the grain. When he died, his sons, with the families, continued to occupy the house which he owned in Gairsay, only making a party wall in the great drinking-hall. 43

It was the fashion in Norway in old times, says the Olaf Kyrre Saga,44 for the king's seat to be on the middle of a long bench, and the ale handed across the fire (from the bench on the other side, the fire being in the middle of the room). Olaf Kyrre first had chimney places in the rooms (ann. 1069 et seq.).

In 1153-54, in a war between rival Orkney earls, Earl Erlend is surprised at night: "Ufi jumps up and would wake the earl, and could not get him awakened, so dead drunk was he.” 45

In the fourteenth century, we are told, "When these (Irish) kings were seated at table, and the first dish was served, they would make their minstrels and principal servants sit beside them and eat from their plates and drink from their cups. They told me this was a praiseworthy custom of their country, where everything was in common but the bed." 46

It is hardly surprising that the splendid court of the richest king of Western Europe, whose family, through the kings of Palestine, was connected with Eastern society, used to the disposal of great wealth, should have looked with contempt upon the primitive peoples of the other parts of the Islands whom they overcame.

Fosterage.-Keeping in mind that this society of joint user and joint responsibility rested on a supposed unity of kinship, even if very remote, it was united by a still closer and a still stronger tie, that of fosterage. Each member of the aristocracy sent his children to be brought up by his kinsmen in their households, to be educated and trained.

The English writers of the seventeenth century appear to have considered this custom as an evil and curious survival peculiar to the Irish, and to have been unaware that the system

of fosterage was equally in use in the Western Highlands, where James was trying to destroy the native population, as well as in many other parts. They would appear to have been wholly ignorant, in their Jacobean conceit, that it was founded on a wide and healthy blood relationship common to the Aryan world. Davis 47 says of it: "I did never hear or read that it was in use or reputation in any other country, barbarous or civil, as it hath been, and yet is, in Ireland, where they put away all their children to fosterers; . . . and the reason is because, in the opinion of this people, fostering hath always been a stronger alliance than blood."

Camden's account of it is: 48 "They that be of more noble parentage shall have a number of nurses repair unto them straightways from far, which make suit for the nursing of the infant; and of those foster children they make more account than of their own which they bear. . . . The foster fathers take much more pains, bestow more goods by far, and show greater love unto their foster children than they do unto their own children. All those that have been nursed by the same woman love one another more dearly, repose greater trust in them, than if they were their natural whole brethren and sisters. To conclude, the greatest corruptions of Ireland are thought to spring from these foster fathers and nurses and from naught else."

We need not confine our illustrations of fosterage to Ireland. To quote from the Orkney Sagas: 49 in the eleventh century, Thorkell, who has fallen under Earl Einar's displeasure because he spoke up for the freemen at the yearly Things, flew to Caithness and became the fosterer of Einar's competitor, Earl Thorfinn, who sent him into the isles to get his scatts and tolls. In 1139 another young earl, Harold, comes to the Orkneys to be fostered by Earl Rognwald, and to be joint earl with him. The tie of fosterage counteracted the jealousy which the self-interest of the older man created against the younger who aspired to share his rule. Throughout all the Scandinavian records the tie of fosterage implies a lessening of the evil results of the perpetual violence within the family.

The T.A.C.N. (chap. xi.) show us the tie of kinship giving

way to the feudal lord's wardship, but the reason given for the change is not adverse to fosterage as a tie. The mother, it says, is not to have the custody of the children, because she may marry again and have children, and these or her husband may kill the first children to have their propertynor the kinsmen for the same reason. Who then? The lord, says the law, the lord of the soil, who cannot have their heritage in dominio-the lord, who has evidently become at this time a stranger in blood to the people who held land under him. The child is to be brought up in the lord's house, the T.A.C.N. contemplating a tie less likely to lead to abuse than that between the wicked Uncle and the Babes in the Wood. They will love them par noreture, of love only, and will loyally care for their rights over the waste (lor bois), and their tenements, and will spend the produce of their lands upon their advancement.

But alas for the weakness of human nature, it goes on to say avarice "est orandroit si montée que li segneur gastent les biens as orfelins"; and but very little later, chaps. 3, 4, and 5 of Magna Charta try to provide against the excessive reliefs of the minor on coming of age, and the waste of goods or men by the lord during his minority.

These provisions of the T.A.C.N. only apply to military tenants, and not to the vavassors or tenants in socage, the burgesses of the towns, and the villeins (rustici), who were probably by far the larger part of the population.

In Scotland, as in Ireland, the fosterage system was a prominent feature of society, and remained as a part of it until a very late time indeed. The kinsmen of the chief fostered his children, taught and fed them, and made gifts to them of cattle and other things. It was a social privilege, or, if you like to call it so, a social burden, an acknowledgment that there was a common bond between all in the same community, through the head of the family from whom they professed to be descended. The foster parents were those who were within the closest degrees of kinship, the "geilfiné" relations of the family.50 A "lawful tribesman by consanguinity" is defined as the person so near him of his tribe as to foster the children which descend from him if he should require it.”

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But though fosterage as a part of communal life could be illustrated from very many parts of Europe and from Asia, it is from Ireland that we have the details of the system as a practical institution. 51 Here the respective rights and duties of the parties were as carefully guarded in fosterage as were those of the chief and the tribesman. The Irish fosterage was of two kinds, for affection and for payment, the payment being according to a regular scale of price by rank. 53 Minute directions are given as to the clothes which the children are to wear, and the work to be done: "according to the rank of each man, from the humblest man to the king, is the clothing of his son." Stirabout was the ordinary food, for which the father provided the cow, with butter (salt for inferior and fresh for higher grades) for the sons of chieftains and honey for kings. Fosterage for daughters was of higher value than for sons. For the sons of the poorer men herding animals, kiln-drying, which shows that malting was well known, and wood-cutting was the work, and for daughters herding animals, the use of the quern, the kneading trough and the sieve. Chieftains' sons were taught swimming and horsemanship 54 (the son of a king was to have a horse in the times of the races), and chess playing, and daughters sewing, cutting out, and embroidery. The system of boarding out pauper children in cottages in England has been unwittingly borrowed from the fosterage customs of the despised Irish.

The foster father, when he was paid for fosterage, was responsible for the crimes or damages of the child; if the child was blemished by neglect of the foster father for payment, he lost his fee; and if he had no children of his own, he was entitled to his support in his old age from the foster child. On returning the child the foster father presented him with a gift called the seds of lawful maintenance. There is provision for fosterage by a literary foster father, 55 who instructs the pupil, prepares him for his degree, chastises, feeds and clothes him while he is learning in other words, apprenticeship. The foster pupil, on his part, assists his teacher in poverty, supports him in old age, gives him the honour price or fee received on his degree, and all gains of his art while learning it, and the first earning of his art after