The entire land belonged to the clan, and was held theoretically in common, and a redistribution made on the death of each owner, though it seems doubtful whether so very inconvenient an arrangement could practically 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 grazing it afforded which constituted its value.  Even to this day a man, especially in the West of Ireland, will tell you that he has “the grass of three cows,” or “the grass of six cows,” as the case may be.

It is curious that the most distinct ancient rules concerning the excessive extortion of rent are, as has been shown by Sir Henry Maine, to be found in the “Senchus Mor.”  Under its regulations three rents are enumerated—­namely, the rack rent to be extorted 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 undistinguishable from slaves, yet from none of these could any but fair or customary rent be demanded.  It was only when those who by no fiction could be supposed to belong to the clan sought for land that the best price attainable might be extorted and insisted upon.

In so primitive a state of society such persons were almost sure to be outcasts, thrown upon the world either by the breaking up of other clans or by their own misdoings.  A man of this class was generally what was known as a “Fuidhar” or “broken man,” and answered in some respects to the slave or the serf of the early English village community.  Like him he seems to have been his lord’s or chief’s chattel, and if killed or injured the fine or “eric” was 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, whether of English or Irish descent, and were by them quartered forcibly in war time upon others, and so there grew up that system of “coyne and livery,” or forced entertainment for horse and men, which is to be met with again and again throughout Irish history, and which undoubtedly was one of the greatest curses of the country, tending more perhaps than any other single cause to keep its people at the lowest possible condition of starvation and misery.