never have been tolerated by the chiefs nor desired by the subjects that one belonging to another clan should in any way have authority beyond the circle of his own people. Accordingly we find at a very early age the number of bishops was increased abnormally. Every tribe—in some cases every family—had its own bishop. The present 'rural deaneries' were nearly all ancient bishoprics, and they correspond almost invariably with the territories of the old Irish tribes.
Moreover, as the abbot was a kind of chieftain, and generally near of kin to the ruling house, it is plain that the principle of selection in his case was different from that which would regulate the choice of bishops, and that it would often happen that the abbot would be both unsuitable and unwilling to hold the episcopal office. Under such circumstances, the spirit of clanship led the people to cling to their leader, that is, the abbot, and put the bishop in the second place. The result was that the office of bishop was entirely dissociated from territorial authority—he had no diocese—and the cases were numerous where he was under the control of the abbot, exercising episcopal functions only under his direction. This, in its turn, led to a further increase in the number of bishops. As none of them had a see in the modern sense of the word, and therefore there was no possibility of one prelate interfering with the jurisdiction of another, it began to be a matter of pride in some monasteries to have a number of bishops amongst their inmates. In some cases it seems to have been the usage to have seven belonging to the same establishment. In the Litany of Ængus the Culdee, said to have been composed in the ninth century, there is a list of one hundred and forty-one places in Ireland where this
