Connected again with the notion of communal ownership is the denial of proprietary rights of kings and lords. It must not be a question whether the _altum dominium_, the extreme form of proprietorship in land, was a good thing or a bad thing. We want to know the facts first, before we pass a valuation on them. Mr. Orpen is obsessed with the notion that the Irish order and the Feudal order were as the poles apart. Accordingly he says that the Irish political structure nowise depended on grants of land. I do not know and I do not inquire what may be the peculiar virtue of a polity depending upon grants of land; but I do know that the structure of Irish political society in the twelfth century was mainly based on that foundation. Documentary proofs, referring to various dates from the travels of St. Patrick down to the eve of the Norman invasion, show that every lord in his degree, from the local chief of a small territory up to the king of Ireland held and exercised the power of granting ownership in land over the heads of all occupiers. If the king of Tyrone was also king of Ireland his power of making grants was not confined to his domestic territory of Tyrone. So the Annals tell us that Muirchertach O'Lochlainn, king of Tyrone and monarch of Ireland, granted a town-land at Drogheda to the Cistercians of Mellifont, and a charter of the same king is extant granting lands at Newry to another religious house. Diarmait MacMurchadha was king of Leinster, his domestic realm, or as Mr. Orpen would say his tribal territory, being Ui Ceinnsealaigh. He was also recognised over-king of the Norse kingdom of Dublin, which included a stretch of country northward from Dublin and outside of the kingdom of Leinster. In virtue of this extended kingship, Diarmait granted lands at Baldoyle to a religious community, and the charter of his grant is still extant. In truth, the granting and regranting of lordship over lands is the keynote of the Irish dynastic polity from the fifth to the sixteenth century. What then of the objections that were raised to the introduction of feudal law under Henry VIII. and afterwards? Was it not contended on the Irish side that the chief or king had no more than a life-tenure of the territory he ruled, and that in accepting feudal tenure he was disposing of what did not belong to him? That is so. In accepting feudal tenure, he disposed of the succession, which he had no legal power to determine: the determination of which, within limits fixed by law, belonged to his people. It was theirs, not by virtue of communal ownership of the land, but by virtue of the right of election to the principality. Of this right they were deprived by the introduction of feudal law. The law of tanistry was a reasonable provision which preserved the right of election and yet determined the succession in advance. XI. THE NORMAN CONQUEST