Each separate stateship was at once two things. It was a political unit in the State and a social and economic unit in itself. The people were the stateship, and the stateship was the people, for with them the power finally lay. They ruled their own affairs within the limits of their stateship, but were held within the single purpose of the State by the unified code of laws outside of which it was not within their power to transgress. However weak the monarch might be, these laws, and the trained and hereditary brehons who administered them, held the stateships in a uniformity of practice that was remarkable long after the invader’s foot had brought disruption. But within that uniformity each stateship worked out its own destiny according to its own local needs. Originally, it would seem, the land held within the limits of the stateship was divided out among all its people. But strangers entered, outlaws from other stateships and men upon the world, who became servitors to the original freemen. These held no land, and therefore held no political rights in the stateship, inasmuch as they did not belong to its staple life. These were, broadly, the two main divisions of the social life: _saor_ and _daor_, words only approximately rendered by free and unfree. There were sub-divisions within each of these. The unfree could, with time and by steady conduct, enter the ranks of the landowners. A number of them could as tradesmen form a guild, and as a corporate body claim political rights. But the staple life of the stateship being the life on the land, in the main only those who held land could have a voice in the guidance of its political destiny. These were the overwhelming majority; for the unfree classes being accidental to the life of the stateship they, for the most part, either passed on, or, remaining, in the course of time joined its political life in some capacity. This was inevitable. For no man held the land he occupied in his own right. All the land occupied by the stateship was vested in it, and each occupier only held its usage by his right as a freeman of the stateship. The stateship had the power to take any man’s holding from him, from the king down, if he defied the will of the whole or was outlawed. The Noble classes held somewhat more securely, though it is not easy to define in what their greater security consisted; and in later times, owing to the unsettlement introduced by an invader’s presence, they claimed a prerogative right. But the plain meaning of the laws is that no man held any land from which the stateship could not dispossess him. That is quite clear and explicit. Therefore the land belonged not to its individual users, but to the stateship, though each freeman of the stateship could, as a freeman, claim, and was bound to receive, land for his use.