The _Aire desa_ had ten such tenants, five bond and five free. He is described as ‘the son of an Aire and the grandson of an Aire, with the property of his house.’ The _Aire echta_ seems to have ranked with the _Aire desa_. The _Aire ard_ had twenty tenants or _Ceile_, ten bond and ten free. The _Aire tuise_, so called ‘because his race has precedence, and he takes precedence of the _Aire ard_,’ had twenty-seven tenants or _Ceile_, fifteen bond and twelve free; and the _Aire forgaill_ or highest rank has forty tenants or _Ceile_, twenty bond and twenty free. Besides these _Ceile_ or tenants, so constituted by voluntary contracts between the freemen and the _Flath_ or chief, he had likewise _Bothach_ or Cottiers and _Fuiddhir_, strangers, or broken men from other tribes, whom he settled upon his waste land in return for homage and service, and these, if they had remained nine times nine years on the land, became what were called _Sencleithe_ or old standers.[167] This account of how the constitution of the tribe became modified and altered by the effect of internal change and external influence pretends to be nothing more than a speculative view of it, but we have now reached that stage in its progress when it fairly enough represents the tribe in the form in which we find it in the ancient Irish laws; but as these laws with their commentaries belong to different periods, some branches of them being obviously more modern than others, this must be borne in mind in endeavouring to extract a view of the organisation of the tribe from them. [Sidenote: State of the _Tuath_ or territory of a tribe.]