passed out of the original family by female heiresses, was generally confirmed by charter on the heir male, to be held hereditarily under the head of the house. Nor was the _Toshach_ a character confined to the Celtic people alone; for the Mayor of the palace under the early Merovingian sovereigns, who was usually elected at the same time as the king, and was perhaps a member of the same royal race, was known as the _Dux Francorum_; very much resembling the Gaelic _Toshach_, and the dignitary whose title appears upon the early British coins under the Latinized form of _Tascio_.[273] Many of the features, indeed, displayed in the Celtic Gavel were not in any way peculiar to the Celtic people, but will be found to have very generally existed in every part of western and northern Europe, wherever a portion of the population continued to hold their land by the older system, which was stigmatized as _Roturier_ after the feudal theory of “knight-service” was recognised as the only principle of “gentle tenure.” In the intermediate period, when the earlier system still held its ground side by side with the principles of Roman law, and the shifting allotment to which every member of the _Folk_ or _Leod_ was entitled by “the right of blood” was passing gradually into a fixed and permanent inheritance, length of possession, variously reckoned in different early laws, alone conferred pure allodial property in land amongst the German people--for the chartered grant from the king was thoroughly Roman--whilst throughout the North, long uninfluenced by contact with Imperial Rome, the original principle of descent, which was still traceable in the Germanic nobility of this period, and in the “inborn” right acquired by the lower orders, was in full force; the _Bonder_ growing into the _Odal-Bonder_, and if his blood was strictly pure, into the _Holder_, solely after the lapse of the necessary number of descents. Long after the conquest of the ancestral dukedom of the English kings by Philip Augustus of France, the main features of the law of Tanistry, which seemed so strange to the Anglo-Irish lawyers of the seventeenth century, were still familiar to the Normans of the continental duchy. All the family up to the sixth degree were joint proprietors with the Senior of the race in the _Tenure-par-Parage_, holding by fealty alone, the seventh in descent passing from amongst the privileged kindred and holding by _homage_, thus becoming “_the man_” of the head of the family, just as the fourth in descent by Scottish custom became an _Og-tiern_ under the Thane. The difference in the number of descents was simply the result of the introduction of a noble class above the free, and in either case, all who passed beyond the limits of the kindred evidently had an “inborn” right to a fixed and final provision.[274] A similar principle seems to have regulated the holding amongst the continental Angles, which never passed to an heiress until