- Power, Politics and Status -
been regarded as chattels without legal rights; they were prisoners of war, those unable
to pay their debts, or else, like St Patrick, people captured abroad by slave traders.
Slavery was of considerable economic importance, and one system of measuring value
in early Ireland used as its unit the value of a female slave. In early medieval Ireland
there were also serfs, who were bound to their lords and could not renounce their
tenancy.
The majority of individuals must have fallen within the free class, able to exercise
their legal rights within their own community but subject to the authority of those
of higher status. Roman authors such as Caesar, using Latin terminology, separate
the equites (nobles), as well as some special categories such as the druids, from the
ordinary people, and the Irish literature distinguishes the nemed (privileged person);
as with the classical account of Celtic society, this term applies not only to the nobles,
but also to those with certain special skills or knowledge.
The special groups mentioned in the classical authors include druids, bards and
prophets (Piggott 1975), though it is possible that craftsmen may also have enjoyed
a privileged status. Bards were particularly important, since singing the praises of a
noble was a public way of honouring his status in society. By the time of the early
Irish laws, the role of the pagan druids had declined, and the most important of
the skilled classes was the poets, who rehearsed the traditional lore and praised the
nobles for their achievements or satirized them for their failures (McCone 1990).
Other groups of valued specialists included lawyers and physicians, as well as
hospitallers, who owed their status to the generosity of the hospitality they offered
to visitors. Others who enjoyed special status included skilled craftsmen such as
carpenters and metalsmiths, as well as entertainers such as harpists.
The highest status was that of the king. Kings are attested in western Europe
in the prehistoric period by the classical authors, although the institution was in
decline in some parts by the early first century Be, as will be described below.
Kingship was also the normal form of political authority in early medieval Ireland
(Byrne 1973), and comparison with other parts of Europe suggests that there was
an underlying tradition of sacral kingship common to the Indo-European world,
and perhaps of considerable antiquity. The king was supposed to be wise, successful
in battle and without physical blemish, and the well-being of his people was closely
tied to these qualities. By the seventh and eighth centuries AD, the time when many
of the legal tracts were first being written down, the nature of kingship was already
being transformed into something altogether more powerful and more secular, and
the spread of Christianity had eclipsed its pagan religious connotations.
The possibility of women holding positions of high status in their own right,
rather than by virtue of their male relatives, seems to have varied. Some of the richest
graves of the early Iron Age in central Europe were certainly the burials of women,
and in the first century AD in Britain two women held power as queens over their
tribes, Boudica of the Iceni and Cartimandua of the Brigantes. The picture given by
early medieval Ireland, however, is very different. Neither the laws nor the Annals
suggest that women were able to exercise political power, either in theory or in
practice. They had no independent legal rights, but took their status from
their fathers and husbands. The qualities valued in a woman were the traditional
patriarchal ones of virtue, reticence and industry.