of Edinhurgh, Session 1882-83. 
119 
inherent right to support or proceeded merely from the self interest 
of the lord himself in the preservation of his property, it is very 
difficult to say. 
But below these there was a class of slaves who were mere 
personal property ; probably orignally captives of war, but latterly 
in many instances freemen who had been reduced to want, and who 
sold themselves as a condition of receiving maintenance and pro- 
section from the powerful and rich ; and this sale affected their 
posterity. 
While there seems very little doubt that the position of the pre- 
dial serfs even if originally equivalent to that of slavery became 
latterly a mere form of tenure of service, and that they had probably 
to endure none of the degradation of positive slavery, there can be no 
doubt that it was not so with the other class. Theirs was a slavery 
from which men fled in horror, and to which they were dragged 
back in terror and in chains. The early Acts of Parliament abound 
with evidence of this and with directions for the recovery of fugi- 
tives, and even in the 14th century slaves were recaptured, and 
handed back to their owners under sanction of the law. 
These were the poor of the ancient tenures, and we can readily 
discern why they were so largely dependent on the lords of the soil 
for maintenance and defence ; their gradual emancipation from actual 
serfdom or slavery followed insensibly on the development of the 
church and the progress of society, but their dependence on the chief 
or lord continued, and while they swelled the train of his followers 
they looked to him for support. This was a burden which speedily 
began to press on the chiefs in the Highlands, and although plague, 
pestilence, and famine came largdiy to their relief, the growth of the 
population impelled them insensibly into that turbulence and rest- 
lessness which distinguish the annals of our Highland life ; it is not 
perhaps so picturesque as one would wish to ascribe the frequency 
and the fierceness of Celtic feuds to the mean necessities of the 
larder, but these economic forces were too powerful to be ignored 
in any veritable history of the clans. 
It is very interesting to those who study these ancient forms of 
life to find extant, or only recently extinct, forms of society possess- 
ing all the main features which we have reason to believe character- 
ised these early days in our own country. The practical experience 
