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The Norman lords in many parts of the country lived right in the midst of an Irish population, with its Brehon judges, shanachies, harpers, and other officers, attached to their customs of gossipred, fostering, tanistry, gavelkind, and other usages, which the parliaments of Drogheda, Kilkenny, Dublin, Trim, and other places, were soon to declare lewd and barbarous.
It may be that in another fifty years not one of these Shanachies will linger; education will have made a clean sweep of illiteracy. And yet again, it may be that by that time, not only in the Western baronies but through the length and breadth of Ireland, both song and story and legend will be living again on the lips and in the hearts of the people. Go leigidh Dia sin.
He was truly the patriarch of all under him, acknowledged as he was to be the head of the family, elected by all to that office at the death of his predecessor, after due consultation with the files and shanachies, to whom were intrusted the guardianship of the laws which governed the clan, and the preservation of the rights of all according to the strict order of their genealogies and the traditional rules to be observed.
One saw therein groups of shanachies, and harpers, and Brehon lawyers, all conversing with their chieftain in the primitive language of the country. Hence were they called degenerate by the "foreigners" living in Dublin Castle.
He confused the cycles, it is true, taking the Red Branch heroes for contemporaries of the Fianna, which is much as if one should make Heracles meet Odysseus or Achilles in battle; but he had these earlier legends by heart, a rare acquirement among the Shanachies of to-day. Here then was a type of the Irish illiterate.
We have already seen that so sacred were the limits of the clan districts, that one of the chief duties of ollamhs and shanachies was to know them and see them preserved. But if territory was defined in Celtic nations, the right of holding land differed in the case of the chieftain and the clansman.
Of course we have a corps of shanachies, or story-tellers, gleemen, gossipreds, leeches, druids, gallowglasses, bards, ollaves, urraghts, and brehons; but the children can always be shifted from one role to another, and Benella and the Button Boy, although they are quite unaware of the honours conferred upon them, are often alluded to in our romances and theatrical productions.
And upon the level green in front of the regal abode, or in the banqueting-halls, might always be seen noble companies of knights and ladies bright, some feasting, some playing at the chess, some giving ear to the music of their own harps, some continually shaking the Chain of Silence, and some listening to the poems and tales of heroes of the olden time that were told by the king's bards and shanachies.
And would their enemies, who were now their masters, have countenanced the proscribed offices of files and shanachies, when laws against them specially had been so long enacted if not enforced? Now was the exact time for the rigid execution of those laws so evidently designed for the transformation of the freeborn natives into feudal serfs.
Henry VIII. seemed, therefore, with the help of his minister, St. Leger, to have succeeded in breaking up the clans, after the Irish national government had been broken up long before. Confusion of titles, property, and traditions became worse confounded. How could the shanachies, bards, and brehons, any longer agree in their pedigrees, songs, and legal decisions?
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