Returning now to the main object of the inquiry we seem, in the perhaps to some extent superficial and too simple view taken by Sir John Davies of the Irish tribal arrangements, to have found what we sought--to have got a glimpse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of an earlier stage in the working of the tribal system than we get in Wales nearly 1,000 years earlier. In this stage the land in theory was still in tribal ownership, its redistribution among the tribesmen [p230] was still frequent, and arable agriculture was still subordinate to pasture. Lastly, the arithmetical clustering of the homesteads was the natural method by which the frequent redistributions of the land were made easy; while the run-rig form of the open-field system was the natural mode of conducting a co-operative and shifting agriculture. But whilst gaining this step, and resting upon it for our present purpose, we must not be blind to the fact that in another way the Irish system had become more developed and more complex than the Welsh. Sir John Davies sometimes dwells upon the fact that the chief was in no true sense the lord of the county, and the tribesmen in no true sense the freeholders of the land. The land belonged to the tribe. But, as we have seen, he found also that, as in Wales, the chiefs and sub-chiefs had, as a matter of fact, rightly or wrongly, gradually acquired a permanent occupation of a certain portion of land--so many townlands--which, using the English manorial phrase, he speaks of as '_in demesne_.' Upon these the chief's immediate followers, and probably bondservants, lived, like the Welsh taeogs, paying him food-rents or tribute very much resembling those of the taeogs. «The complications described in the _Brehon Laws_.» This land, as we have seen, he calls '_mensal land_,' probably translating an Irish term; and we are reminded at once of the Welsh _taeog-land_ in the _Register trevs_, which also, from the gifts of food, was called in one of the Welsh laws '_mensal land_.' Further, besides these innovations upon the ancient simplicity of the tribal system, there had evidently, and perhaps from early times, grown up artificial relationships, founded upon contract, or even [p231] fiction, which, so to speak, ran across and complicated very greatly the tribal arrangements resting upon blood relationship. This probably is what makes the _Brehon laws_ so bewildering and apparently inconsistent with the simplicity of the tribal system as in its main features it presented itself to Sir John Davies.