A bo-aire may have a full and complete plough team and twenty cows and other things, and he may even rise to the giving of proportionate stock to tenants of his own if his stock should have grown too much for his land. But he still may remain a bo-aire. He may, however, rise from a bo-aire into a _flaith_ (or chief), when he has double as much as an ‘aire desa’ and has established himself with a _green_ round his homestead, and so surrounded his house with a _precinct_ in which he can give protection to cattle taken in distress, this being one of the important duties and functions of a chief (flaith) (iv. pp. 309-317). It would seem that even when a man had risen to be the chief of his kindred (fine) he might still be simply a bo-aire, and not necessarily yet a _flaith chief_. In another tract, among other disconnected items are the following:-- Whatever number of the divisions of the bo-aires happen to be contending, though one of them be older than the others, the grade which is most wealthy, _i.e._ in point of wealth, it is it that takes precedence. He is a hill of chieftainship in the third person. Unless his father and grandfather were flaith, though he may be of the same race as to his origin, his chieftainship is lost to him. A plebeian chief is one whose father or grandfather was not a chief (flaith). (iv. pp. 379-381.) It would seem from these statements that to become a flaith from the rank of bo-aires something like an election was needful, and that wealth weighed most in the election. It shows, however, that it was election out of a class or family in which the flaithship descended from father to son, and that one of the qualifications was that a man’s father and grandfather before him must have been flaiths. [Sidenote: The ‘aire desa.’] So too in the ‘Crith Gabhlach’ (iv. p. 321) the _aire desa_ must be the son of an aire and the grandson of an aire. He has (probably a minimum of) ten tenants, five _giallna_ and five _saer_, and gets a food-rent from each. But he himself takes proportionate stock from his chief, for which he pays food-rent in the same way. [Sidenote: The ‘aire ard.’] The _aire ard_ has twenty tenants, ten _giallna_ and ten _saer_, and in his turn he takes proportionate stock from his chief (iv. p. 325). [Sidenote: The ‘aire tuisi.’] The _aire tuisi_ has twenty-seven tenants, fifteen giallna and twelve saer, and he takes himself proportionate stock from a king, ‘and he makes corus-arrangements _in the raith right of his father and grandfather_,’ whatever this may be (iv. 325). [Sidenote: The ‘aire forgaill.’ The ‘Ri-tuaithe.’] Above him is the _aire forgaill_, with forty tenants; and at the head of the flaith or chieftain grade comes the _Ri-tuaithe_, who is the chief or King of a Tuath. [Sidenote: The lower grades take stock from the higher and pay food-rents to them.]