Transcriber’s Notes:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_), and text
enclosed by equal signs is in bold (=bold=).
Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.
* * * * *
The Gaelic State in the Past & Future
OR “THE CROWN OF A NATION”
By Darrell Figgis
This book gives a careful historical analysis, in clear and simple
terms, of the Gaelic State, and shows exactly what that State was,
how it worked, and in what way it could be adapted for the modern
requirements of a Nation. On the basis of that analysis it outlines
a State for the future that claims to be a continuity of Ireland’s
historic past.
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The Gaelic State in the Past & Future
or “THE CROWN OF A NATION”
By DARRELL FIGGIS
MAUNSEL & CO., LTD.
50 Lower Baggot St., Dublin
40 Museum Street,
London
1917
* * * * *
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
POETRY.
A Vision of Life (1909). The Crucibles of Time (1911). Queen Tara: A
Tragedy (1913). The Mount of Transfiguration (1915).
NOVELS.
Broken Arcs (1911). Jacob Elthorne (1914). Children of Earth. (In
preparation.)
GENERAL.
Shakespeare: A Study (1911). Studies and Appreciations (1912). “Æ”: A
Study of a Man and a Nation (1916). A Chronicle of Jails (1917).
Cahill & Co., Ltd., Printers, Dublin.
Irish Paper.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE PURPOSE OF THE BOOK 1
II. THE MAKINGS OF A POLITY 8
III. THE POLITY AND THE STATE 15
IV. THE WORKING OF THE STATE 27
V. THE BROKEN STATE 36
VI. THE RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD 45
VII. AT THE GATES OF THE FUTURE 55
VIII. APPROACHING PROBLEMS 79
* * * * *
The Gaelic State OR “THE CROWN OF A NATION”
I. THE PURPOSE OF THE BOOK.
A Nation is crowned when it exists in the world not only by virtue of a
continuing national life, sustained by history and limited by natural
frontiers, but also by reason of a State in which its intuitions and
desires are expressed in a form as flexible as its containing life. The
stubbornest national sense--and nowhere in the world has that sense
proved more stubborn than in Ireland--can only be said to exist as
a protest, rather than as a power, until it can take to itself that
eventful crown. No other nation, or combination of nations, or empires
or dominions, can give it that crown. It must beat it out of its own
sense of wisdom and equity and beauty. It can only be responsible to
its own soul and intellectual life for the manner of that crown, not
only because in no other sense can the word responsibility be said to
apply, but also because of a certain inevitable result. For when a
Nation does so crown itself the whole body of the Nation takes on a new
dignity and grace. It is inevitable; the wearing of the crown compels
a new comportment. But if a crown wrought in some other workshop and
made according to some other nation’s desires be pressed upon its brow
the whole result must necessarily be ungainly and disfiguring. If there
is no responsibility in the making there can be no responsibility in
the wearing, and there is no morality at the beginning or in the end.
Yet if a Nation can clothe itself in its own responsibility, and wear a
crown of its own devising, that Nation is no more only a Nation; it is
a Sovereign State.
Ireland is not a Sovereign State, but only a nation. Once she was
a Sovereign State, and the result was so comely and so full of
responsibility that when her sister states were ravaged by barbarian
inroads from the north and east she went out among them and rebuilt
their faith and culture. Nearly all modern European culture and
learning rest on what Ireland wrought during the sixth seventh and
eighth centuries, not on the earlier Roman and Greek cultures, for
the link with these things was only maintained through Ireland. It
was so maintained because Ireland was a Sovereign State, secure in
its sovereignty. That sovereignty was suppressed, that statehood was
broken, because of the lust of imperial conquest fashioned out of
military strength and resting always on that strength. Piece by piece
that state was taken and hammered into dust, with a malignancy and
hatred very hard to understand, until the people, driven forth into
the mountains and waste places of their own land, had no longer any
part of their own State in which to house themselves, had to rely
on a continuing national sense, fed partly by faith, enriched by old
memories, burnt by a suffering hardly to be paralleled in history, but
in itself something quite peculiar and indefinable.
The result was inevitable. Housed, on their own historic land, in
a State which was no State at all because it was not of their own
devising, the Irish people have repudiated all responsibility for it,
have misused and abused it, and have arisen in a continual series of
revolts against it. They were morally bound to do so, or become no
more a nation but a slave race. Continuing a Nation they were bound to
assert their protest; and they have habitually done so very remarkably
by the assertion of the laws, meanings and implications of their old
State, destroyed centuries ago, as against the forms, meanings and
implications of a system of government utterly alien to them. There are
few things in history more remarkable or arresting than this challenge
of an alien government with the laws and procedures of a State that
centuries before had been hewn asunder, had been trampled under foot,
but had continued in the instincts and intuitions of the Nation--the
instincts and intuitions that in the first instance, at the dawn of
history, had built that State.
Such a state of affairs, continued long enough, was bound to claim
the attention of the world. It has succeeded in doing so; and the
immediate result has been that all has become bustle and hurry to
mend the calamitous condition of Ireland. Men with anxious brows and
careworn faces have begun to emit constitutions for Ireland at the pace
of about one a week--with a facility hardly to be rivalled by the Abbé
Siéyès of old in his most fecund hour. Dusty tomes are turned down
from the top shelf, and every form of constitution and government is
studied in order that it may contribute some new beauty to the destined
scheme. Canada, Australia and South Africa have been laid under special
contribution, because these are held to be adornments of the English
Empire. The words Home Rule, Colonial Home Rule and Dominion Rule buzz
about the air like flies of a summer’s day, and nobody seems to be very
clear as to what they exactly mean, except that there is a deep-seated
suspicion that they are not being used very honestly. The air is racked
with precedents from China to Peru; and amid it all, with a patience
born of centuries, stands the Nation for whom all this pother is
supposed to be raised.
The strange thing about it is that all this bustle and stir should so
persistently neglect what is just the cause of the whole trouble. That
cause is not economic; it is not, in the modern abuse of the word,
political; it is historic. The economic and political troubles are
incidental to the historical. The constitutions of English colonies
such as Canada, Australia and South Africa may be good, bad or
indifferent, wise or unwise, discreet or indiscreet; but they are as
little applicable to the case of Ireland, and would eventually cause
as much irritation, as Dublin Castle. They were created (generally
as the result of menace) by Englishmen who went abroad as colonists,
singing sweet hymns about the White Man’s Burden and the Lord’s
Anointed. Earlier colonists in those lands, however, such as the French
in Canada and the Dutch in South Africa, give these constitutions no
fealty because they do not answer their instincts. For the same reason
Irishmen in these places, though less solid and unified from the nature
of their case, generally become subversive and revolutionary units,
introducing and desiring changes such as the constitutions never
contemplated. When these changes are examined they are generally found
to hark back to the laws and meanings of the old State of Ireland. But
in Ireland itself the Nation, reduced though it be in population, and
by oppression made unsure of itself, is entire and compact; racially
more compact than any nation in Europe, with little of the colonial
element remaining in it; and it draws almost wholly on its historic
past. And from that past the answer must be found for its future, for
the past has stored up instincts and intuitions, old memories of the
blood and desires of the national mind, that are waiting to burst into
the future. The answer therefore is not to be found in a study of the
constitutions of other peoples, but in a wise study of Irish history.
There is, outside of books, no such thing as Utopia. There is no such
thing as a State abstractly good or bad in itself. A State is only
good or bad in the degree in which it answers, or fails to answer, the
needs of the Nation for which it is devised. All the rest is words.
Similarly there is no such thing as ancient history--except in the case
of nations, such as Assyria, that have ceased to exist. All history
is new and living, because in it are to be discovered the urge and
impulse of national minds. Particularly is this so with Ireland, where
the right national development was suppressed by an alien military
conquest. The nineteenth century, for instance, was full of unrest,
of demands, of swift instinctive actions, that can only be understood
by turning back three hundred years of history. It is true that these
national intuitions have been frustrated so long that they are no
longer sure of themselves. It is true that, the development having been
hindered for so long, it is difficult to gauge what these intuitions
would mean in the light of wholly changed conditions. Yet, in spite of
all this, the principle remains sound, that it is only by searching
into a nation’s mind that its desires and impulses can be discovered,
and it is only by watching those desires and impulses when they were
free to exercise themselves creatively that a State can be guessed-at
that shall be that Nation’s crown.
It is this search that I purpose in this little Essay. I am aware
of the adventurous nature of the task--an adventure rendered doubly
difficult by the confined space of the Essay and by the fact that it
breaks new ground--but it is necessary that someone should undertake
it, however ill-equipped he be for the task. It has necessarily to be
compounded of research, criticism and speculation, each being based
upon the other in the order stated. It is always desirable that history
(especially Irish history, where the lying and depreciative tongue is
not unknown) should be fully documented; but the slender limits of this
Essay prohibit this. I make no statement, however, for which I have
not chapter and verse before me. I have tried to make the criticism
as direct and obvious as possible; but it is of course unavoidable,
even if it be desirable, that a man’s predilections should influence
the nature of his criticism. And as the speculation is based upon the
criticism it is equally unavoidable that the speculation should also
express the personal desire--though it does so happen that this is not
always the case. All constitution-building is speculation; but if that
speculation is based on history, and a just and critical search into
that history with a view to discovering what are its permanent and
what its impermanent, what its fundamental and what its incidental,
elements, then it will be a national uplifting and not an irritation, a
national hope and not an embarrassment and frustration. It is the hope
of this book to promote thought along these lines; and if it achieve
this it will have succeeded, even if it be finally cast aside by both
writer and reader. For certainly time so spent will be more profitably
spent than in the study of constitutions of alien peoples across the
seas, or by any sort of constitution-mongering that gives no heed to
the impulses of an old and historic Nation.
II. THE MAKINGS OF A POLITY.
The myth of Invasions, elaborated from the seventh century onwards,
shrouds the earliest Irish history from our view. Something authentic,
aged and significant passes behind that screen, but we cannot clearly
see what it is. Irish history only begins to emerge from that screen,
and to pass into the clearer light of knowledge, with the opening
centuries of our era. We then begin to get parts of information that
can more and more be checked with one another and with other known
facts, so building up a history that can be submitted to criticism; and
it is interesting to notice that the emergence into greater certitude
occurs at the very moment when the national life begins to be framed
into a distinct and recognisable polity, ever tending towards a central
authority.
The process begins with or about Tuathal Teachtmhair, Tuathal the
Arriver, about the middle of the second century. With him there
is still much twilight, but with him the daylight quickens. The
main outlines of his life and work, even of his personality, can
be checked with one another and take their place in a logical and
reliable whole. With him the makings of the new State begin; and
they continue, in spite of periods of disrepair, until at the end of
the first millenium the State was knit together by a fiscal system
that was put to writing. The work has much of the simplicity due to
the simpler conditions of the time, although in fact the result was
highly complex and elaborate; but, almost alone among the nations or
peoples of Europe, in Ireland the work of constructive State-building
went forward. Strife abounded (and modern times have lost what little
right they ever had to point an accusing finger at it); it abounded
throughout Europe, and Ireland had its share; but in Ireland the State
always held the national sense together, and it was always being
revised to meet new needs. It is interesting briefly to survey the
process.
Tuathal came at a strategic moment. The Ulster Cycle shows quite
clearly a struggle between Connacht and Uladh for the hegemony of the
five provinces of Ireland. The earlier parts of that cycle (though
written to exploit Uladh) show that hegemony claimed and won by
Connacht; the later parts show it passing to Uladh. Then there is a
dark period, in which we have no literature to guide us and for which
the records in the Annals of Tigernach give little help. During this
time occurs the mysterious episode known as the Revolt of the Vassals.
Whatever that episode meant, it appears that Tuathal’s mother had to
fly the country. He himself returned later to his province of Connacht
to resume the dynastic struggle with the kings of Uladh for the rule of
Ireland. Probably Tuathal was the Irish prince to whom Tacitus refers
as being for a time with the Roman legions in Britain. The dates are
approximate; and Tuathal’s first act on his return to Ireland suggests
that he had not misspent his time. Fighting in Ireland prior to this
time had mainly been that of contests between famous warriors, or from
chariots. Henceforward it becomes that of trained legions existing as
a standing militia. For Tuathal established the Fianna Eireann; and by
means of this new weapon he restored the hegemony to Connacht.
It is right briefly to trace this dynastic struggle between Connacht
and Uladh, because out of it, and out of the needs it created and the
problems it raised, grew the national State. Tuathal, king of Connacht,
with his palace at Cruachan Ai, came east to Uisneach, and from there
exercised the hegemony of Ireland. It is said that he took the “necks”
of the four provinces where they touched one another, and in each
“neck” held a national festival for each quarter of the year. At Tara a
special festival was held, at which the Brehons discussed and collated
the laws, and at which the local rulers discussed and compared the
local administration of the country. In other words, a general tendency
towards uniformity was set up because of a direct central authority;
and it was undoubtedly because of this tendency that Tuathal’s son,
Fedhlimidh, who succeeded him, received the title of Reachtmhar, the
Law-giver.
Tuathal, however, did not come east to Tara, except to the festival.
Tara was the seat of the kings of Leinster, with an elder glory and
significance attaching to it that it is not easy to explain in any
critical use of the materials available. It was not for a century
after Tuathal that the Connacian dynasty, in the person of Cormac,
established itself at Tara and compelled the kings of Leinster to make
their headquarters elsewhere at Naas. Then the central authority took
a fresh accession of strength, and a definite and distinctive polity
began to emerge, with the looser system that till then had prevailed
tightened up and made uniform in all its parts.
The hegemony, for instance, passed, and Cormac became Ard-Ri, or
Monarch, of Ireland. The new province of Meath was created for
the maintenance of the new monarchy. The festivals at Tara became
more splendid and authoritative, deriving as they now did from the
administrative authority of the monarch. This was especially the case
as Cormac shines out quite clearly as a man of considerable force of
character and a statesman of a very high order. Under his supervision
the laws were reduced to writing. They might previously have existed
in writing, for there are indications to show that writing existed
from a very early time in Ireland; but they were now gathered in a
single authoritative book. The immediate result of this would be that
a stricter uniformity in their administration was created. To ensure
this, and to make more easy the general administration of the country,
he regrouped the administrative units of the nation. Until then the
nation had consisted of a number of separate stateships. Some were
quite small, some were of considerable size. Some had been bound under
heavy service, some had been comparatively free of service, to their
respective provincial kings. We do not often hear after this time of
these different obligations of service, nor do we find these great
differences of size; and it is significant that this disappearance
should occur at a time when we are told that Cormac created a new order
over Ireland. He made a number of new units, uniform in size, grouped
in the provinces, and leading up in ranks of authority through the
provincial kingships to the monarchy.
The old stateships were known as Tuatha; the new were called Triocha
Ced. The title Triocha Ced does not survive, while the older title of
Tuatha does. Therefore it seems likely that the new Triocha Ced became
known by the older and more familiar title of Tuatha; and, where an
old Tuath of considerable size had a number of Triocha Ced created
within it, that the new units became known as Tuatha, while the older
stateship maintained its authority over the new units and became known
by a new title that now comes into use, that of Mor-Thuath. That is
conjecture; but it is a conjecture that conforms to the facts as we
know them in the subsequent development of the system.
Such is the polity as it left Cormac’s hands. He also established
the Fianna Eireann as a standing militia in the provinces--except in
Ulster, where the dynastic war had not ceased, and was not to cease
till the burning of Emain Macha. The political system he created, with
its central code of laws, was one that could continue itself without
a central power; and it did so continue; for with his passing the
central power weakened, falling into less able hands.
With the coming of Christianity two centuries later the system received
a new strength and unity. Loeghaire, the Monarch at the time, was
himself a man of considerable strength and ability, and Patrick was an
administrator of power and insight. The fact that the laws were revised
in the general assembly at Tara, in order to bring them into conformity
with the teaching of Christianity, was in itself an impetus sufficient
to brace the system anew; and a further strength was given when Patrick
based his church system on the political system, making the units of
one identical with the units of the other.
Only two things remain to be mentioned in the making or unmaking of
the polity. After the battle of Ocha, in the year 482, the dynastic
family broke, the older line continuing as kings of Connacht, while
the younger line held the monarchy at Tara. While it continued at
Tara, with its central situation, it could hold its authority, though,
as with all monarchies, its authority depended upon the personality
of the monarch. But with the abandonment of Tara, after 1560, this
authority was at once weakened, having to be exerted sometimes from the
far north. The system, however, continued, because its device was such
that it could continue itself. The State existed, complete in all its
parts, at once simple and complex, sufficient for its own maintenance;
but the strong central directive was lacking; for the tendency
towards centralisation was suspended with the abeyance of the dynastic
struggle. It was supplied, however, when Brian Borumha sprang into the
field, and snatched the monarchy from a weakened line.
Brian rallied the nation, and knit and perfected the system that
Cormac had created. A simple, and indeed very modern, method existed
to his hand that was partly turned to his purpose. It is customary to
speak of the Leabhar na gCeart as the Book of Rights, or Tributes. The
modern word, however, is Taxes; for taxes remain taxes whether they
be paid in coin or in kind. Each of the seven great territories, into
which the provincial authorities had devolved, had some time prior to
Brian laid down a regular revenue to be contributed to them by the
stateships under their authority. This had been done as a national
system, and had been committed to writing in one book. Brian, having
transferred the Kingship of Thomond to his own line, revised the
contributions accordingly within his own particular territory. He also
took contributions from each of the other six Kingships as Monarch of
the Nation. It only therefore required the centralisation of what was
really a fiscal system to complete the unity and central function of
the State. For so statecraft has always been compelled to meet the same
difficulty that confronted Brian in A.D. 1002.
Had Brian lived, or had he been able to establish his dynasty, the
result would, without doubt, have been achieved. Unfortunately he fell
in the hour of his triumph, at the battle of Clontarf. He had broken
the O’Neill succession; and the elder branch of that dynasty were the
O’Conors of Connacht. Therefore for a century a triangular dynastic
dispute arose between the O’Briens, the O’Neills, and the O’Conors.
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.
Each 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 transgress. 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 transgress; 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
Davies, 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 similar 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.
IV. THE WORKING OF THE STATE.
There never yet was a State, however perfectly devised, whose
performance did not fall many leagues away from its intention. The
dusty tomes on the top shelf only record the perfect, or imperfect,
intention, for it is only by virtue of that intention that States exist
at all. They do not record the follies and fatuities, the intrigues
and trickeries, by which the best intentioned States are brought to
grief. In all vocabularies the word Polity signifies something noble,
and in all vocabularies the word Politics means something ignoble. It
is perhaps necessary to remember this, for a certain type of historian
(primed to depreciate everything Irish) has been very eager to
discover the motes in the eye of the early Irish State while carefully
neglecting the beams in the eye of its own modern wisdom.
Yet the intention of a State remains worthy for its own sake; and that
the Irish performance during the first millenium did not fall very
far away from the intention is clear, not only by what it achieved in
Ireland, but also by what it achieved in Europe. As we have said, roses
are not produced from waste heaps. The Irish State was actually in the
process of solving its gravest fault when the invasion of a militarist
system made that solution impossible. When Brian died in 1014 without
establishing his dynasty--when his son died in battle with him without
being able to claim the reversion of his father’s work--Ireland was
thrown into a dynastic war. Had Ireland remained without invasion
the Nation must have solved that difficulty by eventually winning
some system in which the executive stability would have been secured.
Unhappily the country was invaded by a militarist system, which, being
a militarist system, lived on no economic labour of its own but preyed
on the economic labour of the country and played off one part of the
dynastic dispute against another in order to secure the fruits of its
robbery. It so happened that the Nation had no means of resistance.
The Fianna Eireann had been disbanded because it had threatened the
State. The stateships could not be called upon for more than six weeks’
military service at a time, and then not during Spring or Harvest, for
the Nation had to continue its economic life or endure famine; while
the feudal Normans preying on the economic labour of others could make
war at all times and without cessation. And every year saw them making
good their hold, while the stateships weakened, until finally when
Hebridean mercenaries were introduced and quartered on the stateships
it was too late to eject the invader.[1]
It has sometimes been suggested that these dynastic wars arose because
the kingships, from the monarchy downwards, were elective. This is not
so. The trouble was that they were neither one thing nor the other.
Had they been frankly hereditary a certain kind of security would have
been won for the executive. On the other hand, had they been frankly
elective, basing the election on the necessary qualifications for
kingship demanded in the laws, a different kind of stability would
have been secured. The straightforward dependence on the people’s
choice would have compelled some protection for their choice when
made, especially as the defeated candidates would still have preserved
intact their chances for a subsequent election; and the monarchy
would have been drawn into closer relation with the stateships.
The system that actually prevailed, however, gave neither sort of
advantage, and was plainly a compromise from some earlier dispute. The
monarch was elected, it is true, but he could only be elected from
the _righ-damhna_. That _righ-damhna_ consisted of all within three
generations from a king. That is to say, if a king’s sons were not
chosen in the succession after him, and the grandsons were missed, and
the great-grandsons after them, then the whole line passed out from
the _righ-damhna_. Now, if Irish history be closely examined it will
be found that most of the disputes arose at this critical point. Men
were usually not willing to carry their failure to secure election to
the point of war unless they happened to be at the critical fourth
generation when that failure meant the extinction of their whole
line from royal rights. And when it so fell out that three separate
dynasties claimed those rights, it is fairly clear that the critical
moment would always be arising, or always be threatened.
It is speculation to suggest how this would have been remedied had the
State been left free to work out its own destiny. Clearly the executive
would either have become frankly hereditary or frankly elective.
Probably at that time it would have become hereditary, especially as
the son generally claimed to succeed from his father unless there
were special reasons why he should not or could not. But then, what
of the kings of stateships and territories? Had these also become
hereditary the State from top to bottom would have become impossibly
rigid; but there are reasons to suggest why this would not have been
so. For one thing, the kings of stateships were elected by the voice
of the freemen, whereas the kings of the higher executives were
elected by their own courts. Moreover, the stateships served immediate
and local needs that required the consent of the freemen for their
continual adjustment. The two operating together would undoubtedly
have compelled, without any of the complications of a _righ-damhna_,
the perfectly free election of the executive head and leader of a
stateship. Therefore had the monarchy become hereditary there would
have been two contradictory principles in the State; there would always
be a tendency to bring one into line with the other; and it is not very
difficult to see which principle would finally have prevailed.
Any arrogation of power by the monarch (and it is the first principle
of monarchs to arrogate power) would have struck athwart the rule of
the people in their most familiar and immediate life. A moment always
arises in history (always has arisen and always will arise) when a
monarch and a people front one another with the claim to real power. In
such issues the people always win in the end, even when their rights
in the State are most degraded. How much simpler would the issue be
when the people, as in the Irish State, held the land, the final source
of all wealth, in their own possession in corporate stateships? In
the crisis that later befell all States no nation could have faced
the future with greater assurance than Ireland, had Fate not thrown a
sterner destiny before it.