Page:Ireland and England in the past and at present.djvu/29

Rh for his debts or fines. As far back as one may go, there was among these people some private ownership of land, but for the most part land belonged, at least in theory, not to individuals but to the tribe. Originally, it would seem, there had been collective ownership, and land had been the common property of the members of the community. Within a tribe some of the land was held by the chieftain, and some as private property, but the bulk of it was tribe land, the arable being divided up among the tribesmen from time to time, and the grazing land and waste held in common. Thus, when a member who held part of the tribe land died, his land did not go to his children, but was divided up among the male adult members of the community. This was the custom of gavelkind, once widespread over Europe, and long existent in English Kent. Hence a man could not alienate his land outside the tribe, and there were tribal obligations concerning the management and disposal of it. Within these old restrictions a man might do with his land as he pleased. This communal or tribal land system is one of the important factors in the history of Ireland. In early times such a system had existed in most primitive communities of the so-called Aryan peoples; it was in England among the Anglo-Saxons and traces of it long continued. But it persisted in Ireland far longer than in England; and one of the tragedies of Irish history is the forcible overthrow of the Irish system by the alien system of the English invaders, and the wrongs