Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/28

 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