The Story of Ireland

aside a long and uncounted crowd of kings, with names as uncertain as their deeds, pushing aside, too, the legends and coming to hard fact, we must picture Ireland still covered for the most part wit

anders up to a cent

mentary agriculture showed perhaps here and there in sheltered places. Sheep and goats grazed then as now over the hills, and herds of cattle began to cover the Lowlands. The men, too, were possibly beginning to grow

nfortunately exceedingly little. It is not even certain, whether human sacrifices did or did not form--as they certainly did in Celtic Britain--

xpeditions undoubtedly began in very early times. St. Patrick himself was thus carried off, and the annalists tell us that in the third century Cormac Mac Art ravaged the whole western coast of Britain, and brought away "great stores of slaves and treasures." To how late a period, too, the earlier conquered races of Ireland, such as the Formorians, con

f Europe, but as regards the rest there was probably little difference. Fighting was the one aim of life. Not to have washed his spear in an adversary's gore, was a reproach which would have been felt by a full-grown tribesman to have carried with it the deepest and most lasting ignominy. The very women were not in early times exempt from war service, nay,

ht from wrong. Men, even the wildest, rarely indeed live entirely without some law to guide them, and certainly it was so in Ireland. A rule was growing up and becoming theoretically at any rate, establ

ting long before; traditions regarded indeed by Celtic scholars as tracing their origin beyond the arrival of the first Celt in Ireland, outcomes and survivals, that is to say, of yet earlier Aryan rule, showing points of resemblance with the equally Aryan laws of I

judges and the law-makers of the people, and whose decision was appealed to in all matters of dispute. The most serious flaw of the system--a very serious one it will be seen--was that, owing to the scattered and tribal existence prevailing, there was no strong central

te to be offended. Everything, from murder down to the smallest and most accidental injury, was compensated for by "erics" or fines. The amount of these fines was decided upon by the Brehon, who kept an extraordinary number of imaginary rulings, descending into the most minute particulars, such as what fine was to be paid in the case of one person's cat stealing milk from another person's h

tance, was simply unknown. Even in the case of the chieftain his rights belonged only to himself, and before his death a re-election took place, when some other of the same blood, not necessarily his eldest

pposed to be that of the first chief or ancestor of the race, "upon which stone the Tanist placing his foot, took

it to take up the chieftainship, and this continued to prevail for centuries after the Anglo-Norman invasion, and was

imony, but by the time he grow to a competent age and have buried an uncle or two, he al

actically have been adhered to. All sons, illegitimate as well as legitimate, shared and shared alike, holding the property between them in undivided ownership. It was less the actual land than the amount of

from one of a strange tribe; the fair rent from one of the same tribe; and the stipulated rent to be paid equally to either. The Irish clan or sept was a very loose, and in many cases irregular, structure, embracing even those who were practically undistingu

as paid not to his own family, but to his master. Such men were usually settled by the chief upon the unappropriated tribal lands over which his own authority tended to increase. This Fuidhar class from the first seem to have been very numerous, and depending as they did absolutely upon the chief, there grew up by degrees that class of armed retainers--kerns and galloglasses, they were called in later times--who surrounded every important chief, whet

the rule of his chief. Blood-relationship, including fosterage, was the only real and binding union; that larger connection known as the clan or sept, having the smaller one of the family for its basis, as was the case also amongst the clans of the Scotch highlands. Theoretically, all members of a

the men who bore the same name as yourself. Beyond that nothing was sacred; neither age nor sex, neither life nor goods, not even in later times the churches themselves. Like his

l, that almost insane joy in and lust for fighting, that marked inability to settle down to

e outside their own community should have been remarkably slight, and of nationality, as we understand the word, quite non-existent. Their own little circle of hills and valleys, their own forests and pasturage was their world, the only one practically of which they had any cognizance. To its scattered inhabitants of that day little Ireland must have see

ULCHRAL CHAM