I must glance, for an instant, at the distinctive features of the land system of Ireland in the Celtic age, for despite the effects of confiscation and conquest, faint traces of it may still be seen, and have a kind of influence.[36] As was the case in all communities of the Aryan stem, the land originally was largely held in collective ownership; but agriculture developed individual ownership by degrees, though less so in Ireland than in more progressive countries. The people were settled on the soil in tribes, clans, and septs, these being the larger and the smaller units; the modes of the tenure of the land, misinterpreted by Elizabethan sages, differed widely from each other, but revealed the traditions of old patriarchal usage and power, especially in their canons of descent and succession. The feudalisation of the land, as it has been significantly called, a process which took place in nearly the whole of Europe, was also witnessed in Ireland, to a certain extent; but this was not so complete and strongly marked as in France and England. The land, nevertheless, was, throughout the island, held ultimately from a supreme monarch; it was divided, under him, among families of princely chiefs, who ruled vast tracts with scarcely controlled authority; inferior chiefs were subject to these; the organisation of the land had much in common with the organisation of the Anglo-Norman manor, and with the position of the Lord Paramount of every manor, the head of the English State. The Irish kings and chiefs had lands in demesne; they had a landed and a personal _noblesse_; the territories they ruled were held by classes strongly resembling the free tenants, the villeins, and the serfs of the feudal system. All this, however, was not as perfectly defined as it was in lands feudalised to a higher degree; and though the Davieses and Spensers were wholly in error in representing the dependents of the Irish kings and chiefs as little better than a horde of fighting men and slaves, Ireland never fully possessed the liberties feudalism secured. The Ceile of substance, who had lands of his own, seems to have been in an inferior position to the English freeholder; the Saer stock and Daer stock tenants held their lands by a tenure like that of the metayers of France; the Fuidhirs were kept in complete subjection, and had not even the rights of the villein. The land, too, was still largely held in collective ownership; in its occupation this is even now seen in backward and poor districts; and, curiously enough, distinctions were drawn between what was a 'fair' and a 'rack rent,' words still common in the mouth of the Irish peasant, and to which recent legislation has given its sanction.