Lesson Six ~ The Structure of Early Gaelic Society
The main focus of this lesson is on Irish society, largely because the records are better and go back to a period when Pagans and Christians co-existed. The records of Welsh society date back to a time when Christianity was pretty much dominant, and the Druids had long-since been slaughtered by the Romans. In looking at Welsh records trying to pick out native Pagan elements from Christian, Roman, Saxon and (in due course) Norman influences is a lot harder. To some extent this lesson is a bit of historical indulgence, though it may provide inspiration on alternate ways of running society.
The tribes of Britain and Ireland lived a largely rural life up until the coming of Rome. The first cities were built on these shores by the Romans ~ up until then even the largest settlement hadn’t been much more than a village. As with any kind of small-scale life, people would have known everyone in their community by name. They would have depended on each other for survival.
A variety of legal tracts, known collectively as the Brehon Laws, have survived describing tribal life in Dark Age Ireland. It bears a remarkable similarity to some of the things described about Continental Celts by Greek and Roman writers several centuries earlier ~ suggesting that change was a very gradual process.
What comes across is a picture of a caste system in which most of the power was split between the religious caste and the landed gentry (much the same as it was in Europe up until the rise of international corporations.)
Everyone was part of a family, called a fine. This I would consist of several generations, and include aunts, cousins, grandparents, etc. The leader of the family was the cenn-fine. This man, or occasionally woman, acted as representative for their kinfolk in the law-courts. If a member of the family wanted to make a legal contract ~ such as a marriage, a business deal, buying or selling land ~ then they needed the consent of the cenn-fine. If they entered into contracts sneakily, then the cenn-fine could revoke them. Think of the cenn as rather like the head of a Mafia clan!
The Gaelic word cenn (pen in Welsh) means both head of the body, but also head of the tribe. Just as the head of a body was seen as the focus of spiritual powers, so the head of a tribe was also a well-spring of magical energies. This is in many ways similar to the role of the paterfamilias in early Roman society, whose soul (the genius paterfamilias) was prayed to, that it should guide and inspire the familial head to look after his kinfolk well.
The Celtic class system had two major divisions. The nemed were the blessed ones, people considered to have a magical quality to them. Mainly this consisted of the chieftains and the Druids (in later centuries Christian abbots and bishops too). Even into medieval times it was widely believed that European kings had special magical powers, even to the point of imagining that the touch of a monarch could heal disease… though the evidence that it ever worked is scant! The doer-nemed were the ordinary people ~ farmers, warriors, merchants, servants, craftsmen, etc.
Tribal leaders were appointed to office by a limited form of democracy, in which a group of powerful families would select one of their own number to act as chieftain. This group was known as the derbhfine. The person selected was probably most often male, but there are a fair number of references to female leaders in historical and mythical accounts. In addition to choosing a chief, the elite families would also appoint a sort of understudy called a tanaiste. If the chief fell ill, was killed, deposed, etc, then the tanaiste would take over from him, at least temporarily.
History leaves us accounts of the tarbh-feis ceremony, whereby Druids used divination and visions to confirm that the candidate for leadership was approved of by the Gods. In the tale of the Lia Fail, an ancient rock must be stood upon by the would-be chief and, if he were righteous, the rock would cry out. A deafening silence was scarcely a good omen. Whilst the Lia Fail was brought from another world, modern scholars see it as a metaphor for the land itself. A good chieftain was known not just by his (or her) political decisions and battle victories, but by the state of the land and the creatures that dwelt upon it. The ‘Testament of Morann’ says that: “through the Truth of the ruler that milk yields of great cattle are maintained… abundance of every high, tall corn… fish swim in the streams”.
A poor chief, no matter how apparently astute he might be at politics, was stained by famine, plague, barren cattle and childless women. The Land was, in many was, the ultimate judge of a chieftain’s quality.
The power of a chieftain was maintained through a series of feudal allegiances. To class as a flaith or Lord, a land-owner must have a minimum of ten small farmers as his ceile (clients). Should he loose too many through war, plague or desertion to a better flaith, then he lost all the social status and legal authority that went with his title.
Once a year a chief held a ceremony known as tuarasdal, where he expressed his gratitude to his loyal ceile and famed champions by making them gifts (such as cattle, land, weapons, jewels, etc). One might compare the modern Christmas gift-giving as a sort of equivalent, in which people (perhaps secretly, whilst outwardly claiming it’s the thought that counts) assess how much someone else values them. In modern Gaelic tuarasdal has come to mean a wage packet. The duties of a ceile were various. They included paying rent on arable or grazing land, raising warriors in times of conflict, and coinmed~ hosting the flaith (and his hungry entourage) during tours of the provinces.
The old name for a client-lord relationship was lanamnas, which extended to any sort of relationship in which one party had more power than the other, e.g. parent-child, teacher-student, etc. In time lanamna came to be applied almost exclusively to marriage (in a future lesson you will see that the nine types of Irish marriage were largely based on which partner was the richer). These levels of patronage formed the basis of society at least until the arrival of the Normans in Ireland. A farmer or artisan might be client to a local flaith, who in turn was client to a grander chief, who in his turn… and so on up the pecking order.
The relationship between a lord and client may be seen reflected in religious terms. At the human level, an abbess acted as ban-flaith (Lady) to her nuns and monks ~ and we may reasonably suppose that in Pagan times a high ranking Druid acted as flaith to less experienced Druids. Yet a person might also form the same type of relationship to a god or other spirit. The deity offers protection, healing, advice, knowledge, material goodies, etc, in exchange for services from mortal devotees.
Whatever it is that Gods need, one of the important features of lanamnas is balance. A lord must fulfil his duties to the client as surely as the client must aid their lord. Parents have duties to children, but in Gaelic law the child (particularly once grown up) also had officially recognised duties to the parent. Onesided relationships were seen as unhealthy. A person who always gives is a doormat, no matter how well-intentioned their desire to help. A person who constantly takes and demands is a parasite. Each partner in lanamain must recognise that they have a duty to give certain things to the other person, but also a duty to allow that person to give back to them ~ there is no honour in emasculating someone, nor in allowing yourself to be rendered servile.
This applies as much to the Gods as to other humans. Hosting a ritual for a god may be seen as fulfilling the coinmed, but there should also be expectation back of the deity. If your life is barren, then maybe you need a better head to guide you (either that, or you‘re not fulfilling your duties to them).
Celtic society operated on a caste basis, where social class was tremendously important. We have just talked a little about the landed gentry, from whom the chieftains were drawn. It should be borne in mind that most of these aristocrats were expected to be warriors and fight in battle, male and female alike. In a previous lesson we discussed the religious caste ~ the draoi, filidh and faith. Whilst the Druids (and later Christian clergy) were theoretically the next class down from the aristocracy, in many practical respects they wielded far more power. In the etiquette of the royal court, the Druid had the right to speak even before the chieftain did.
Below the religious caste came what we might think of as the minor gentry ~ farmers of means who owned no land of their own, but rented from an aristocrat. In some respects they were like the cattle barons of Texas, in that their wealth was measured mostly in terms of cow herds. There were various titles, depending on wealth, such as one called the bo-aire, which means a cattle-chief.
Under the rich farmers were the artisans and craftspeople ~ the carpenters, blacksmiths, furriers, potters, weavers etc. Some very skilled craftsmen could achieve a high rank on a par with bishops and brehons. Beneath them were a caste which consisted of labourers and servants in the employ of the upper classes, who rented what land they had off a patron. At the bottom of the heap were the unfree. A number of people fit into this category, but the main one was the fuidhir. Some books call these slaves, but they were not really slaves in the sense that we mean these days. A better translation would be bondsman.
The early Celts did not have prisons, and they rarely executed or flogged people. Instead most crimes were punished by making the criminal pay compensation to their victim. If the criminal didn’t have enough money, then he lost all his social status and became a fuidhir and had his labour contract sold to the highest bidder (the money going to the victim). The buyer could put the fuidhir to doing whatever work they felt like ~ usually all the crappy jobs that no-one else wanted to do. They were paid a pittance for this, but still had a few rights in law and could farm a scrap of land. If they could raise enough money, eventually they could buy their freedom. If trusted, they were even allowed to carry weapons. The child of a fuidhir was also born to that lowly state, but the grandchild was born free regardless of how much or how little money the family had saved up.
Most people were born to the social status of their father (though in some tribes it may have been the mother’s status ~ there is some evidence of this), but could change their class by such means as getting rich, training to become a Druid or Christian cleric, or losing their money and falling down the social ladder.
As well as class, tribe played a big factor in Celtic society. Early Irish law distinguished between two types of people ~ aurrad and deorrad. An aurrad was a citizen of the tribe with full rights in law. The members of a tribe to which your tribe were allied were also aurrad, and could travel into your territory and expect to be treated properly. A deorrad was someone with no rights at all. This could be a total stranger from some tribe with which you were at war, who had foolishly wandered into your territory. Or it could be someone who had committed such a horrible crime that they had been exiled from the tribe. Such a person had no rights at all. If they strayed into your tribeland, then they could be attacked with impunity.
It may well have been the case that people sported some means of easily determining which tribe they belonged to at a glance ~ other tribal cultures from around the world use things like tattoos, unique hair styles, and specially patterned clothing (such as tartans) to proclaim their allegiances. Foreign writers commented upon tattoos, unusual hair styles and such ~ but no surviving accounts tell us the actual significance of these things to the Celts themselves.
Some questions for you to think about:
What do you imagine it would be like living as part of a strongly regulated Clan ~ happy or too restrictive?
Is it right to judge people according to their social class? Should everyone have an equal say in society, or should power be the privilege of a few? If power were to be restricted, should the deciding factor be wealth, birth, education, spiritual attainment or some other factor?
Are there any aspects of ancient Celtic society that would benefit the modern world? What aspects do you think we are better off without?
Practical exercise:
If you have access to a camera, get someone to take a photograph of you. Failing that, study yourself in a full-length mirror. Try to objectively assess what you are conveying about yourself. Do your clothes give out some particular message ~ that you do a certain job, like a certain style of music, belong to some subculture etc? Does your choice of clothing, jewellery etc convey any particular message about your financial status? How about your hair style?
Do you have any tattoos visible to the casual observer? If so, what do these say about you?
What messages does your actual body convey, such as in terms of your diet, exercise regime, use of sun-beds or exotic holidays etc?
If you have a friend that you are studying this course with, compere notes. What do you read into each others appearance? What do you interpret by each others walk, mannerisms, accent, speech patterns etc?
Though we no longer live in the type of tribes that existed 2000 years ago, our whole appearance and manner conveys endless subtle cues about our self-confidence, education, career, marital status, nationality, religion etc. Some of these cues are things we conscious try to impress upon other people, whilst other cues we probably have no idea we are giving off. What is your appearance telling other people about your place in the modern “tribe”?