Tithes and parishes were unknown, and the income of the community was originally derived exclusively from dues and altar offerings; though, by degrees, lands were conferred upon monasteries, fines were levied upon offenders against certain laws, and the greater abbots asserted their right to a _cuairt_ or _visitation_, similar to that enjoyed by the secular princes of the age.[349] The promulgation of the different laws, of which the infringement was punishable by fine, and the progresses of the great Abbots of Armagh upon their Visitations, with the tribute levied upon such occasions, are frequently to be met with in the Irish annalists after the commencement of the eighth century,[350] and as all fines, tributes, and other temporal advantages, fell to the share of the Regular Superior of the monastery, it is easy to conceive how the abbacy, rather than the bishopric, grew to be the object of an Irish or Scottish churchman’s ambition.[351] About the same time occurs the first mention of a personage, second only in importance to the abbot--the Herenach, or lay tenant of the lands of the monastery, answering in many respects to the Advocatus Ecclesiæ upon the Continent. According to the invariable custom of the Gaelic system of tenure, the possessions of the community, or Termon lands, were made over to a tenant, generally some powerful chieftain of the neighbourhood, in whose family the office remained as an inalienable duchas, and who acted as the abbot’s deputy, or maor, retaining the invariable _third_ as his prerogative.[352]