In Ireland the unit would appear to have been the larger circle, the tribe; on the west coast of Scotland, where the seafaring people were broken up into small island communities, or separated in the dales by rough ground and mountain ranges, the chiefs rule over a smaller unit, the sept, clan, or group family, while in the Orkneys and Shetlands the society is based on the family in its ordinary sense.

Feudal Society rests on Individual, Tribal Society on Communal Land Ownership.-The change, then, to feudalism resulted in the creation of a society organised on the individual ownership of land, a qualified ownership resting ultimately on a grant from the king as absolute ruler of all, an ownership which we might describe as an estate or as a tenancy, the system in use at the present day. This system gradually ousted the society constructed on a common usufruct by the whole community of freemen of soil of which they were common owners, as contrasted with the basis of their wealth, the cattle of which they were owners in severalty, the system described by Tacitus and still in full operation in all parts of the Islands where the English influence did not extend.

Let me again explain that I am not suggesting that land was not held in severalty for cultivation under the tribal system. That was inevitable as soon as corn culture invaded the pastoral life. On the contrary, it is most important to keep in mind the power of the chief to grant the waste or forest of the tribe (in the first instance with the consent of the community) to individual owners for military or other service, or to a separate community for a church, or to put on it as squatters his own unfree dependants, or foreigners, who for trade or other reasons were resident in the district. Only by this means can it be understood that the forest, which was also the waste, was not a preserve for the king's sport, but a reserve for the people's wants. Two of the latest writers, Mr M'Kechnie and M. Petit Detaillis, have recently solemnly repeated the old absurdities about the forests being preserves for the king's game, instead of being, as they really were, the great national reserves for timber, then far more important even than it is now, for minerals, and for food for all animals, tame as well as wild.

But there was a difference of principle. Under the tribal system it was acknowledged that every man had a right to a share in the common land. If land was held in severalty, held as fenced land for cultivation or "in right of urine or manure,” i.e. in return for improvements or for special services to the community, it was in the nature of an exception, however wide, to that rule. Under the feudal system, especially as it grew in the hands of the Norman and Angevin kings of England, the acknowledgment was the exact opposite. The land is the king's and in his gift in the first instance, and the user of it only comes to any individual through his favour.

Under the tribal system the chief as one of the community, bound to it by kinship, and sharing its rights and its responsibilities, administered the customary law relating to the land for the benefit of the community. The tendency, no doubt, was in favour of his acquiring the proprietary rights of the people in it, as he eventually did in Ireland, the Western Highlands, and elsewhere. But, even so, it was long before he forgot his kinship to the ruled, his customary duties to his kin, or his place at the head of the family. After 1745, when the power of the Highland chiefs was destroyed, by degrees the proprietors began to exact a rise of rent. But little alteration seems to have been made until the generation of old proprietors was extinct.2 In the earlier times, apart from the mensal lands which descended from ruler to ruler, the chief only held his share of land as a member, a very powerful and prominent member, of the community for which he was in a sense a trustee.

Under the feudal system the king administered the land just as the pope administered the estates of the Church, as the superior lord of a community whose interests in the land vested in him, he undertaking to do or to pay for doing all those matters of national, judicial, and social work which under the tribal system were done or left undone largely by the people themselves.

The tribal chief was of kin either really or fictitiously to the people over whom he ruled. The English under feudal law have been ruled with the rarest exceptions by kings almost wholly of foreign descent.

It need not be assumed as a consequence of the change that the individual in those parts governed by feudal custom had entirely taken the place of the family as the unit of the society. But the tendency was constant in the direction of the individual ownership or tenancy of land, especially as the English connection with Rome grew stronger, and as the crusades and the continental possessions of the English kings stimulated trade; the family, the group family, continuing as a unit to affect many aspects of life, to control farming, to colour judicial evidence, to influence trading, and the status of monastic corporations, appearing in many technicalities of law, and influencing in a hundred ways social and political ideas.

The Federal Authority.—In a society bound together by kinship in which each family had its share in the use of the common property, it stands to reason that any exercise of authority from outside the communal unit would be keenly criticised and checked. Each group family or collection of group families resented interference with the management of their affairs by the leader, however powerful, of another group from beyond. We find that in these parts of the Islands the federal authority was for the most part non-existent, or where it did exist was held in check and nullified by local influences. Any king of Wales, who for the time obtained a predominance over the whole country, did so with the assistance and at the instigation of the king of England. But in Wales there was no recognised over-king as such. Constant war between the princes of North and South Wales prevented any king from obtaining more than a temporary supremacy with opposition. The kings of Man were drawn sometimes from the ranks of the Irish kings and sometimes from the chiefs who ruled in the Western Islands, which, with the north and west of Scotland, were still subject to the king of Norway. Even these Western Islands gradually became divided into two parts, those north of Ardnamurchan, and those south of that point with Man, neither acknowledging the supremacy of the other, and both at constant war. Ireland alone had a recognised overlord, the Ardri. Until Brian Boru, in the eleventh century, seized the supreme power for the Dalcais of Munster, the

Ardri had generally been selected alternately from the two branches of the Hy Neill of Ulster and Meath, so that the successor to the reigning over-king was known and generally acknowledged.

In all ancient society, in England, as well as in the rest of the Islands, the successor to the reigning king was in his lifetime nominated or defined, so as to avoid the certain conflict and confusion which would arise on death. Thus Henry II., who had himself been nominated by Stephen in his lifetime, had his eldest son Henry crowned in 1173 as his successor. The Welsh " edling," as he was called, was generally the son or nephew of the king; the Scottish "tanist" was formerly the brother or nephew.

After Brian's usurpation there was no regular succession or generally acknowledged nomination of a tanist in the lifetime of the Ardri, with the result that the death of the overking was followed by a fight for the mastery between the kings of different parts of Ireland, and the successful one was never fully acknowledged, but reigned "with opposition." It opened the way to the conquest of Ireland from England. At the time of the "Saxon " invasion of the twelfth century, the Ardri, who corresponds to Henry II. in England, is Roderick O'Conor, king of Connaught, Ardri "with opposition," that is to say, obeyed only so far as he can enforce his authority, and not strong enough to take effective notice of every act of disobedience. In this respect his power does not much differ in proportion from that of Henry of England or William the Lion of Scotland, kings who found it necessary to use patience and diplomacy to restrain chiefs in Aquitaine or Sutherland, whose military power was little inferior or even superior to their own. But in each case, in Ireland as much as in the other countries, the office of overlord served a very useful purpose in checking intertribal war. The fear that the over-king, who represented the whole community, would be supported in his attack by other sub-kings, the certainty that in any event there would be great loss of cattle and devastation of good land, often resulting in the worse enemy, famine, kept many a chief from raiding his neighbour.

Territorial Divisions. It is not necessary to go at length

into the matter of divisions of territory, which, I take it, are always the result of accidental growth, aided by earth formation, wars, the uncertain increase of population, arrangement for fiscal and military convenience, and many other agencies of change which contribute to vary any standard of division which may be set up from time to time. To take Ireland as an example. Under the Irish Ardri were five kingdoms or divisions of tribe communities of Ulster, Leinster, Connaught, and North and South Munster; Meath, which was under his direct authority, forming a separate district. (See below, Mensal Lands, p. 143.) Subject to the payment of federal dues, and to the general interterritorial jurisdiction of the Ardri, these sub-kingdoms had the same absolute self-government or Home rule as the French provinces subject to Henry II. of England. Each of these kingdoms in their turn contained further divisions or provinces subject to kingly authority. For instance, before the date of the Senchus Mor, Ulster had been divided into Uladh, the parts east of Armagh, Oirghialla or Oriel, the parts south and west, and Ailech, now Derry, north and west. "He is not a king of territories who has not three kings of territories under him."4 These divisions again in their turn were divided into tribal units called tuaths, cantrevs or cantreds, like English shires, occupied by the different tribes under their chiefs or kings, subject to the king of the province, and as varied in size as English shires. The tribes were composed of group families or septs, and the septs of families. Neither tribe nor sept is an Irish word, the general word in use being "finé," variously used. But we take our historical phraseology from English writers, and the English take all their terminology from Rome.

At the time of the invasions the territorial divisions were not necessarily identical with the family groups or tribes, but they were probably to a very great extent identical. This, so far as I can see in the present state of the authorities, is all that can be said. I would suggest that there was very likely as much difference between the west of Ireland and Leinster or Ulster in progress towards a society based on individual land-holding as there was between Somerset and Kent, or between Argyll and Kirkcudbright.