107 
of Edinhirgh, Session 1882 - 83 . 
‘‘liberi et generosi,” wbo held portions of land for ten or twenty 
years, or for life, with remainder to one or two heirs; these were the 
representatives of the Ceile of the Irish system, for in many cases 
the landlord provided the stock and implements, and the rent paid 
was higher in proportion to the value of these steelhow goods, the 
rent of the land itself being probably a fixed quantity. With these 
ended the grades of free tenure, but below these came two grades 
very important- to us as interesting historical types the agri- 
colse or rustici, who held land from year to year on payment -of a 
fixed rent, but were from their tenure of those servile lands them- 
selves serfs; and second, another class of serfs by whose forced 
labour the chief or thane cultivated his demesne, and who were in 
the strictest sense slaves. All ancient systems of society and of 
tenure are tainted by this bane of slavery, but the Celtic system 
seems to have been saturated with it, and it is a lurid light which 
these two classes of serfdom throw on the expiring system of our 
Celtic land tenure, a light which, before I conclude, I will seek to 
throw into some regions where I humbly think its illumination may 
be salutary. 
The whole framework of this Celtic tenure, with all its intricate 
arrangements of the clans and septs presenting an elaborate system of 
order and gradation, conforms but little with our notions of the 
freedom and breadth of the childhood of our race. The Eastern 
influence in the Celtic church is unquestionable, and the church 
exercised a paramount influence in forming the infant society of 
the Celtic race ; the same hard and inexorable rule, the same 
elaborate gradation, the same spirit of exclusiveness, and the same 
family pride which characterised the Celtic church as it expired 
before the more vigorous system of the Eoman obedience charac- 
terised the Celtic tribal development as it too passed from the stage 
of history. Was it from the unchanging East, that weird 
museum in which even now the worn out theories of human 
society seem preserved for our modern study, that the seeds of the 
disintegration as well as the germs of the development of Celtic 
society came ? 
The records of Saxon tenure, if in some respects less interesting 
than those of Celtic holding, are at least less obscure and indistinct ; 
and the labours of Freeman, Maine, and German inquirers, whose 
