In 1861, Sir Henry Maine’s celebrated book, ‘Ancient Law,’ appeared.
Herein he wrote that it was difficult to say ‘what society of men had
not been originally based on the Patriarchal Family.[11] His studies
had lain chiefly in the law of civilised peoples, Romans, Hebrews,
Greeks, Irish, and Hindoos; not in the customary law of the lowest
races. He, like Mr. Freeman, concluded that the patriarchal family, by
aggregation of descendants (and aided by adoption of outsiders, and by
the _ownership_ of the family by its Head), formed the gens, while the
aggregation of _gentes_ formed the tribe, and the aggregation of tribes
made the State. But, as the _gentes_ had traditions contrary to this
theory, traditions of separate origins, he supposed that ‘the incoming
populace should feign themselves to be deduced from the same stock as
the people on whom they were engrafted.’ Thus we know that McUlrigs
(Kennedys) of Galloway joined the remote Macdonnells of Moidart and
Glengarry, and wore the Macdonnell tartan[12] (1745-1760), and so might
come to pass as Macdonnells, though they still regard the Marquis
of Ailsa, a Kennedy, as their chief, at least in Eilean Shona (Loch
Moidart). In the same way the Camerons of Glen Nevis, though called
‘Camerons,’ were really MacSorlies, a branch of the Macdonnells, and
from the sixteenth century to 1754 were always on ill terms with the
chief of the clan Cameron, Lochiel. These are very modern instances,
but illustrate Sir Henry’s theory of incomers.
The members of the Roman tribes had traditions that they were _not_,
really, of the same original blood with each other. Only by a fiction
were they of the same blood. They did not all descend by natural
increase from one patriarchal ancestor. There really did exist ‘a
variety of alien groups in a local tribe,’ however they might all
adopt the same name, and assert descent, in West Scotland from
Somerled, let us say. This fact, of heterogeneousness within the
‘tribe’ among others, was so obvious and so imperfectly explained,
by friends of the Patriarchal theory, that it occupied ‘writers
belonging to the school of so-called prehistoric inquiry,’ as Sir Henry
styled it.[13] They were not satisfied with the theory that Society
arose in the Patriarchal Family, based on direct descent from, and
ownership by, a single male ancestor. To be sure a Cameron will ‘cross
the hill,’ and call himself Stewart, and a Chinese immigrant into
Australia has discreetly entitled himself Alexander Mac-gillivray.
But such accretions, and such legal fictions, do not explain the
heterogeneousness of the local tribe, which, by the theory of some
historians, is of common descent. ‘Prehistoric inquirers’ could not
but notice that, among ruder ‘non-Aryan’ races of various degrees
of culture, ‘the family is radically different from the Patriarchal
Family,’ and suggests a different origin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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