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Henry VIII., it will be remembered, had granted the hereditary lands of Tyrone to Con O'Neill, with remainder to Matthew, the new Baron of Dungannon, whereas lands in Ulster, as elsewhere in Ireland, had always hitherto, by the law of Tanistry, been vested in the tribe, who claimed the right to select whichever of their late chiefs' sons they themselves thought fit.
His political papers, though occasionally disfigured with the bigotry natural to an apostate, are full of a vigorous sagacity; his contributions to general literature, such as his paper on Tanistry, in Vallency's Collectanea, show how much greater things still he was capable of.
The constitution given by this Prince to the whole country seems to have been a close copy of the Irish it embraced the laws of Tanistry and succession, and the whole Brehon code, as administered in the parent state. The line of Kenneth may be said to close with Donald Bane, brother of Malcolm III., who died in 1094, and not only his dynasty but his system ended with that century.
But the difficulty is sufficiently explained by their own annals and the state of society under which they lived. The Tanistry was the great source of all those evils.
There were four kingdoms Ulster, Munster, Leinster, and Connaught to which the chiefs succeeded by tanistry, besides Meath, another kingdom which always belonged to the principal king, or Toparch, who was in like manner elected as Tanist on each new accession; and the number of battles and murders among these wild Irish princes is beyond all estimate.
This order prevailed in Ireland, where the Northern customs were retained some hundreds of years after the rest of Europe had in a great measure receded from them. Tanistry continued in force there until the beginning of the last century.
It is known that it existed previous to the conversion of Ireland to Christianity, and that the laws of tanistry and of gavelkind, the customs of gossipred and of fostering, were of pagan origin. Patrick revised the code and corrected what could not coincide with the Christian religion.
His political papers, though occasionally disfigured with the bigotry natural to an apostate, are full of a vigorous sagacity; his contributions to general literature, such as his paper on Tanistry, in Vallency's Collectanea, show how much greater things still he was capable of.
An enormous amount of litigation as to the law of real property was created by a judgment of the Court of King's Bench at Dublin, in 1605, by which the ancient Irish customs, of tanistry and gavelkind, were declared null and void, and the entire Feudal system, with its rights of primogeniture, hereditary succession, entail, and vassalage, was held to exist in as full force in England.
Thus we have seen the foundation of the Northern government and the orders of their people, which consisted of dependence and confederacy: that the principal end of both was military; that protection and maintenance were due on the part of the chief, obedience on that of the follower; that the followers should be bound to each other as well as to the chief; that this headship was not at first hereditary, but that it continued in the blood by an order of its own, called Tanistry.
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