too much in the light of his
own age). Irish monasticism was in fact an outgrowth of that of Egypt, not Rome, and its
position in Europe was one of antecedence.
At any rate, the tribes, being the focus of Gaelic political power,
encompassed virtually the entire Gaelic population. Generally speaking, this meant that
anyone with any basic rights at all belonged to a tribe, and usually descended in the male
line from one of the ancient Celtic ethno-tribal groups of Ireland and Scotland (the Gaels
proper—the tribal sense of the name Gael— and also the Laigin, Erainn and
Cruithne), or from one of the Viking or Norman families that came later. The only
exceptions of note were those families which had attached themselves wholly to the church
or some other hereditary profession, or which became so debased in power that they lost
political significance even on the most local scale, and thus lost also their tribal
identity (a unique situation arose for the O’Donegans of North Tipperary and
O’Duggans of Cork who were tribally isolated and thus became entities unto
themselves, while the same can be said for the O’Lynches of County Cavan,
see Part II). Some church kindreds, such as the ancestors of the Skenes
of Aberdeenshire and the Glenesks of Angus, later became temporal lords of their
territories after these abbey lands were secularized in the thirteenth century.
It should be pointed out that families of the Galloway region of
southwest Scotland, though of Gaelic origin in many cases, cannot be placed in the larger
tribal framework of Gaeldom. The reason for this is their descent from
Norse-Gaelic pirates
and sea-kings who originally settled the area, whose tribal identity or continuity was
lost as that tribalism completely lost its political significance. Thus the families of
Kennedy, MacDowell, MacClellan, etc., of the Galloway region, though they form clan groups
traceable from about the end of the twelfth century, fall outside the scope of Part II of
this book. Other families in the south of Scotland are of Norman origin, but as their
ancestors settled in the Lowlands of South Scotland, outside the area of Gaelic influence
and cultural assimilation, most of these fall outside the scope of this book. This also
applies to some families of the northeastern coastal lowlands of Scotland, and even to the
mighty Lowland houses of Douglas and Bruce. The senior branch of the latter inherited and
held the Throne of the Scots (in the person of Robert the Bruce) during the critical wars
of Scottish independence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but their male-line
failed soon after, and their royal inheritance and representation passed to the House of
Stewart.
Tribalism of course influenced Gaelic literature, and the oral tradition is crowded
with kings and heroes, often originally of a divine nature, who figure prominently in the
genealogies of the tribes. Indeed, if you include descent in the female line, the
likelihood was very great that a given Gael might descend, on a regional basis, from an
historical king or hero of old. Such likelihoods,
