clientship

clientship (céilsine) in early Irish law was the relationship between a lord (flaith) and a client (céile). It took two principal forms, called ‘free clientship’ and ‘base clientship’ after the Irish terms sóerchéilsine and dóerchéilsine. In free clientship both the client and the lord could end the relationship at will and without penalties; base clientship did not bind the client permanently to the lord, but it did include penalties which were incurred if one party ended the relationship early against the will of the other.

Base clientship was the more important of the two varieties. First, the status of being noble depended upon being the lord of base rather than of free clients; and, secondly, base clientship was firmly associated with, though perhaps not necessary to, the status of a free commoner. For Críth Gablach the lowest grade of noble consisted of lords of five base clients, the next grade consisted of lords of ten clients, and so on. Similarly, a normal word for the commoner, both inside and outside the legal texts, was aithech, literally ‘(food‐) render‐payer’. Base clientship was, therefore, one of the principal determinants of the shape of early Irish society. It was the subject of a tract within the 8th‐century law‐book the Senchas Már, Cáin Aicillne; most of this text is preserved intact, whereas we only have fragments of its companion tract, Cáin Sóerraith, dealing with free clientship.

For Cáin Aicillne, base clientship normally endured for the lifetime of the lord. It was initiated by a grant or gift from the lord to the client, usually of cattle. Together with this grant came a further payment, ‘the chattels of submission’, equivalent in value to the client's honour price (see enech) and marking the personal subordination of a freeman to a lord. The lord, therefore, began the relationship by making one‐off payments to the client. The latter, by contrast, made fixed annual payments throughout the term of the relationship. The lord created a debt by the initial grant, which the client, the recipient of the grant, took a lifetime of renders to discharge. The client's fixed annual payments took the form of food renders, including both livestock products and grain. Whereas the lord's grant was normally in the form of cattle, the client's render came from both his livestock and arable farming.

Sometimes at least a free client also received a grant from his lord and gave food renders in return. The grant, however, appears to have been much less in value than in base clientship. The renders were proportionately much more valuable, probably amounting to the entire returns from the livestock given. The point may have been that free clientship was not intended to provide the client with further economic resources; since the grant was small, the renders were absolutely of minor significance though proportionately to the grant they were valuable.

Thomas M. Charles‐Edwards