In the Book of Deer we still have the old patriarchal system in full swing. There is the Ardrigh or High King. Under him and over the provinces are the mormaers, and under the mormaers the tribal or district chieftains known as toisechs. All these had their exactions out of the land, besides having their own fat manor lands. They had rights of personal service, civil and military; of entertainment when travelling; and of exacting rent in kind or in money. There were neither dioceses nor parishes as yet. The patriarchal idea was carried out even in the monastic system. Each tribe or tuath had a monastery. Its abbot belonged to a leading family of the tuath or of the founder, in which family the office was hereditary. The system gave rise to great abuses; for as the monastery grew rich in lands the abbot took to do more with the temporal than with the spiritual management, and often the lands passed out of the possession of the monastery altogether into the hands of the laymen. “It was not so in the case of Deer, the clerics of which down to the middle of the twelfth century were still receiving from the bounty of the Gaelic chiefs of this district additions to their monastic inheritance, in the whole of which they were secured by King David I., with full immunity from all secular exactions.” It is plain, however, from the terms of the royal charter, that attempts had been made to fleece them, and that they were able to maintain their rights in virtue of the grants recorded in their book. The abuses of the lay abbacies, though not wholly removed, were fairly checked by Queen Margaret and her sons, through the creation of bishoprics and the gradual supersession of the monastic by the parochial system. Soon, dioceses and parishes, which cannot be traced farther back than the time of Alexander I., began to appear in the records. They had been established in England much earlier. Other new civil divisions and distinctions emerge. The old “countries” and “provinces” become shires. Towns spring up, and the number of individuals and corporations holding personal property and corporate rights increased. A large part of the best land was given by charter from King David to men who held of the crown in feudal tenure. The mormaer became merged in the Earl, and the toisech in the Thane. In short, with the growth of feudal law, and the change to the parochial system, the old Celtic regime was fast becoming a thing of the past, though many of the customs and traditions associated therewith lingered on till the great overthrow of the Forty-five, and even in some localities almost to our own times.