The Gaelic State in the Past & Future/Chapter 3
III.
The Polity and the State.
The polity that thus emerged consisted of a number of stateships throughout the country, each of which was a smaller reproduction of the State in which it was comprised, and each of which was a unit in the organisation of that State. Because it was a system that was competent to continue itself independently of a central authority its natural tendency was to dispense with that central authority; yet the device was such that authority, once established, was distributed from the centre down to all the branches, and was gathered from the branches up towards the centre, in a well-concerted scheme. And this proved to be the case even when the monarch was weak, independently of his personal power.
A good deal of confusion has been introduced into the understanding of old history by the way in which its records were written. Europe at that time was full of wars; and Ireland was no exception. To chroniclers in a day when personal prowess counted for much it was more important to record a battle in which some famous man fell than to record the continuous social life of a community. The result is that in the records the battles seem to obliterate the social life, and plunge it into chaos. To the modern mind particularly it seems so, for the modern man knows nothing of wars save as great continental cataclysms, in which whole nations are hurled against whole nations, and all life is brought to a standstill, while death claims its daily thousands, and chivalry is displaced by venom and hatred. The modern mind must not judge of ancient days by the world's decay. The "battles," that the belittlers of Ireland are so eager to emphasise, as little suspended the general life of the country, seldom employed a larger hosting of men on each side, and even used few weapons more destructive, than the faction fights of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We know, for instance, that the eleventh century, when Ireland was involved in a triangular dynastic dispute and more full of wars than at any other time, is famous for its literary activity. Historians were busy, old tales were re-written, and great books were compiled. All this, we are told, came from a soil across which wars were surging; but the result clearly shows that these wars did not suspend, or even greatly impede, the artistic, social and economic life of the Nation. It is necessary to see this, and to get a right perspective^ in perceiving the life of the nation in the polity it achieved.
Bach separate stateship was at once two things. It was a political unit in the State and a social and economic unit in itself. The people were the stateship, and the stateship was the people, for with them the power finally lay. They ruled their own affairs within the limits of their stateship, but were held within the single purpose of the State by the unified code of laws outside of which it was not within their power to trangress. However weak the monarch might be, these laws, and the trained and hereditary brehons who administered them, held the stateships in a uniformity of practice that was remarkable long after the invader's foot had brought disruption. But within that uniformity each stateship worked out its own destiny according to its own local needs.
Originally, it would seem, the land held within the limits of the stateship was divided out among all its people. But strangers entered, outlaws from other stateships and men upon the world, who became servitors to the original freemen. These held no land, and therefore held no political rights in the stateship, inasmuch as they did not belong to its staple life. These were, broadly, the two main divisions of the social life: saor and daor, words only approximately rendered by free and unfree. There were sub-divisions within each of these. The unfree could, with time and by steady conduct, enter the ranks of the landowners. A number of them could as tradesmen form a guild, and as a corporate body claim political rights. But the staple life of the stateship being the life on the land, in the main only those who held land could have a voice in the guidance of its political destiny. These were the overwhelming majority; for the unfree classes being accidental to the life of the stateship they, for (the most part, either passed on, or, remaining, in the course of time joined its political life in some capacity.
This was inevitable. For no man held the land he occupied in his own right. All the land occupied by the stateship was vested in it, and each occupier only held its usage by his right as a freeman of the stateship. The stateship had the power to take any man's holding from him, from the king down, if he defied the will of the whole or was outlawed. The Noble classes held somewhat more securely, though it is not easy to define in what their greater security consisted; and in later times, owing to the unsettlement introduced by an invader's presence, they claimed a prerogative right. But the plain meaning of the laws is that no man held any land from which the stateship could not dispossess him. That is quite clear and explicit. Therefore the land belonged not to its individual users, but to the stateship, though each freeman of the stateship could, as a freeman, claim, and was bound to receive, land for his use.
Nor could any man sell the usage of any land to anyone not in his own stateship without permission. Within his own stateship he could do so by obtaining permission from his own family. If he died his land was resumed by the family—a process that was known as gabhal-cine, "the seizure of the family," in English corrupted to gavelkind—whereupon a redistribution would occur. From which it would seem that the grants were not made to individuals, but to the heads of families, the kindred being a unit within the stateship as the stateship was a unit within the State. But the right of the individual to the use of land none could withhold; it was his title as a freeman, and was implanted in the heritage of his thoughts and instincts.
Land, and its free possession by the people, were thus the foundation on which the whole structure of the State was built. Power always derived thence and always returned thither again, as surely as water must find its own level.
The divisions of rank among the freemen were mainly ranks of responsibility, with corresponding privileges attached to each rank. The Nobles, for instance, were clearly executive officers of the stateship. They held land from which they could not be dispossessed in any re-distribution that might be necessary. That is to say, they could not be dispossessed of land until they were first dispossessed of their rank, and that would first involve a legal action; but on the other hand they were responsible for the use of that land to the stateship, and could not sell or hire that use to any member of another stateship without permission.
The two chief executive officers were the King of the stateship and (to employ a word that is not so modern as it appears) the mayors of townships. The King was elected by all the freemen in assembly, but their choice was limited to selection from a kingly household, the righ-damhna. He had, sitting in court, the power of capital punishment, with the approval of his brehons and the assent of the people. This, it seems, was a power seldom exercised, for the ordinary operation of the law, went otherwise; but the Annals record instances of its use. He led the stateship in war when a hosting was demanded; and as, in the festivals at Tara, he met in assembly with the Kings of all the other stateships, it would seem that some code existed among them in order to bring the practice of their office into general uniformity.
The other executive officer held the alternative titles of Bruighin-Fer and Baile Biatach. He was primarily the Public Hospitaller. The Bruighin, or Hostel, had mensal lands attached to it by the stateship, and it was built with four doors to the four quarters in order to welcome all travellers, to whom hospitality was dispensed as a public dignity. Over this hospitality the Bruighin-Fer was placed in charge as host for the stateship; but another function attached to his office, and appeared in the second title he came to wear. For the houses of the craftsmen and tradesmen collected about the Hostel, and the whole became a township over which he ruled as mayor. Indeed, the modern Scottish word for mayor, baily, displays this origin quite clearly. The first intention of the Hostel was for the exercise of public hospitality; but inasmuch as the stateship, when it met in assembly to discuss and decide its internal affairs, or for that matter to debate national affairs, met in the same building, the office of the Hospitaller obviously became one of considerable importance in the general conduct of the life of the stateship. He became, not only Hospitaller, but mayor of the central township; and therefore the first of his titles begins steadily to be displaced by the second.
Such men were strictly executive, and not legislative, officers, for the legislation and general conduct of the stateship lay with its two assemblies. The first was an assembly of its nobles, and the second the assembly of all the freemen. They met to decide all internal affairs, such as redistribution of land if a family died out, the admission to political rank of an unfree man, or a guild of craftsmen, and the outlawing of any man who defied the finding of the brehons. But they had other decisions in their hands which linked them in with the whole fabric of the National State. They decided who should be selected for hostings that were demanded of them; and when at a later date Hebridean mercenaries were scattered through the country as a kind of militia, and were quartered upon the stateships, the quarterings would naturally be decided in assembly. Yet the important decision that lay in their hands dealt with the matter of taxes, or tributes. As we have seen, such taxes were levied upon each stateship as a whole, not upon the individuals of the nation; and each stateship was thus left free to distribute such taxes upon its own individuals according to its local circumstances.
In addition, however, to its executive officers the stateship also provided for its professional men. It had its own poets, historians, musicians and lawyers, all of whom were maintained out of the public lands, and church lands were also apportioned for its bishop and clergy. All of these, or at least the highest ranks of these, met together in the national festivals, and debated their own affairs in separate national assemblies with the purpose of bringing about a uniform practice throughout the nation, and fixing rules and regulations to that end. And even at a very late date, when the presence of an invader frustrated the possibility of a central authority, the closest uniformity can be seen throughout the country, whether in poetry, music or law, so well did the system maintain itself when the pivot on which it had swung was gone.
Naturally the brehons were the most important of these professional classes, for in the body of law which they administered the whole practice of the State was to be discovered. They were less judges than civil arbitrators. They had no power of life and death, for that belonged only to the King sitting in assembly. They could only affix the compensations that were due for every offence that neighbour committed against neighbour; and these were determined with the most minute details with regard to every kind of offence in the general body of the law. Some of the compensations can be seen to be such as would ruin the offender; and they were apportioned to every man's wealth according to the rank of society in which he was found, the same offence bringing a heavier penalty on a rich man than on a poor; but the brehon had no means of compelling obedience to his judgment. He could only give his judgment; the rest lay with the stateship.
An old text reads: " The feast of Tara … the body of law which all Ireland enacted then, during the interval between that and their next convention at a year's end, none dared to trangress; and he that perchance did so was outlawed from the men of Ireland." If any man, therefore, resisted a judgment made against him, the stateship outlawed him, and withdrew all association with him. Thrust out from all rights, he could only become a wanderer on the earth. Little wonder that the Chief Baron, Lord Finglas, could say, even so late as 1520, when the central authority was gone, "Irishmen doth keep and observe such laws which they make upon hills in their country firm and stable, without breaking them for any favour or reward." And even Attorney-General Da vies, of ill-fame, declared in 1607: "There is no nation of people under the sun that doth equal and indifferent justice better than the Irish, or will rest better satisfied with the execution thereof, although it be against themselves, as they may have the protection and benefit of the law when upon just cause they do desire it." The reason is not far to seek. Law in the old Irish State was not a mere technical contrivance to be argued from black-letter, as now happens, by a few men whom the people universally distrust; it was founded on a whole nation's sense of justice. Nor was it lawyers who put it into execution; but a stateship of freemen, acting in community, who enforced its obedience or expelled the offender by withdrawing all dealings with him.
Such was the internal economy of the stateship. Within itself it was a social and economic unit. But in the State it was a political unit, for it was fitted in as part of an elaborate national economy. If the stateship in question were part of a Mor-Thuath, then its ruler would only have the title of underking, ur-ri. In that case the stateship (tuath) would only come under the provincial king through the territory (mor-thuath.) Otherwise it would come under the immediate jurisdiction of the province. And the provinces came under the jurisdiction of the Monarch. In the later stages, the territories displaced the provinces and came immediately under the Monarch. But always the result was the same. The purpose of the State was to spread out the administration in a number of diminishing authorities, resting finally on a free people in possession of the land on which the whole system was based; and to gather up that authority in tier after tier of exactly similiar organisations to the headpiece of the monarchy. Each authority was exactly the same as the one beneath it, with its elected king, bishop, brehons, poets, historians and full court, and with its Bruighin and Baile Biatach in capital townships of increasing importance. The Monarch's court was comprised exactly the same as the court of the king of a stateship, except that naturally his officers had necessarily to win higher degrees in the schools. It would seem that the schools themselves, of which the country was full and which won such fame throughout Europe that scholars from far afield came to them, were based upon the same organisation even as the Church organisation had been.
How closely the system was interwoven appears from slight hints cast through the body of the laws. There is, for instance, a law tract dealing with the question of blood-guiltiness which throws an interesting light on this point. It was a simple matter when a man had an action against another of his own stateship: a brehon of their own stateship could deal with the suit. But what happened when a man of one stateship had an action against a man of a different stateship? By what arrangement was the case heard, and in what court was it held? From this tract it appears that an appeal was made up the line to a king, whether of territory, province or the monarch, who had equal jurisdiction over both stateships; and he either judged the case himself, if it called for a death penalty, or appointed a brehon from his own court to adjudicate in the matter. Clearly, then^ the elaborate pattern of the State was not merely an abstract perfection, but one that was submitted to frequent service. And further, a hint such as this also shows that, whatever wars may have troubled the State, its ordinary administration was maintained, while the life it contained raised problems that required to be answered.
Such was the Sovereign State of Ireland. Seen in the Europe of its time the elaborate statesmanship with which it was created seems twice remarkable. Yet the fact that Ireland was able to send the light of learning over a blighted Europe, and the fact that the schools of Ireland became so famous that scholars and students came from overseas to learn in them, would require a national excellence in statecraft commensurate with the national care of scholarship. Rare roses do not usually grow on waste heaps: a truth that it is sometimes useful to remember. Not the least excellence of the State was the equal dignity it gave to women. Whether women exercised political rights or not it is impossible to say; but in the social and economic spheres they took their place as the equal of men. In marriage, for instance, whatever a woman brought to the union remained hers. If the pair were divorced each took his and her own share; whereas if either could prove that by his or her labour the common estate had prospered more than by the labour of the other, that proportion, as fixed by the brehon, was added to the share. The same was true if either of them brought nothing to the union. Never once do we find the law of the Irish State—recognising any inequality between the sexes; and that again was remarkable in the Europe of the time. The whole conception of the Irish State in the ideals which it upheld, in the care with which it was wrought, in the balance of its parts and its simple scheme yet intricate texture—both in what it sought and in what it achieved, may well challenge comparison with the labours of statecraft in any place and at. any time.