Irish Race in the Past and the Present by Augustus J. Thebaud
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page 77 of 891 (08%)
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the offices, the very spirit and language of the Roman administration
disappeared; in their place was reconstituted the traditional authority of the clannish chieftains formerly abolished by Roman power. Ancient genealogies carefully preserved by the poets, called in the British language _bairdd_ - bards - helped to discover those who could pretend to the dignity of chieftains of tribes or families, tribe and family being synonymous in their language; and the ties of relationship formed the basis of their social state. Men of the lowest class, among that people, preserved in memory the long line of their ancestry with a care scarcely known to other nations, among the highest lords and princes. All the British Celts, poor or rich, had to establish their genealogy in order fully to enjoy their civil rights and secure their claim of property in the territory of the tribe. The whole belonging to a primitive family, no one could lay any claim to the soil, unless his relationship was well established. "At the top of this social order, composing a federation of small hereditary sovereignties, the Britons, freed from Roman power, constituted a high national sovereignty; they created a chieftain of chieftains, in their tongue called _Penteyrn_, that is to say, a _king of the whole_, in the language of their old annals. And they made him elective.--It was also formerly the custom in Gaul. --The object was to introduce into their system a kind of centralization, which, however, was always loose among Celtic tribes."--(_Conquete de l'Angleterre_, liv. i.) It is evident to us that if the Britons _constituted_ a supreme power, when freed from the Roman yoke, it was only because they had possessed it before they became subject to that yoke. It is, |
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