ately
taxing the tribesmen was guaranteed to the chief by law, and a share of
all cattle and crops was his by legal right, not as head of the tribe,
but as owner of the land, with power to dispossess the tribesmen if they
failed to pay his tax.

But very many districts had long before this come under the dominion of
Norman adventurers, like the De Courcys, the De Lacys, and the rest, of
whose coming we have told. They also enjoyed the right of private
taxation over the districts under their dominion, and, naturally, had
power to assign this right to others,--not only to their heirs, but to
their creditors,--or even simply to sell the right of taxing a certain
district to the highest bidder in open market.

The tribal warfare of the Middle Ages had brought many of the old chiefs
and Norman lords into open strife with the central power, with the
result that the possessions of unsuccessful chiefs and lords were
continually assigned by the law-courts to those who stood on the side of
the central power, the right to tax certain districts thus changing
hands indefinitely. The law-courts thus came into possession of a very
potent weapon, whether for rewarding the friends or punishing the
enemies of the central power, or simply for the payment of personal and
partisan favors.

During the reign of the first Stuarts the full significance of this
weapon seems to have been grasped. We see an unlimited traffic in the
right to tax; estates confiscated and assigned to time-serving
officials, and endless abuses arising from the corruption of the courts,
the judges being appointed by the very persons who were presently to
invoke the law to their own profit. The tribal system was submerged,
and the time of uncertainty was taken advantage of to introduce
unlimited abuses, to assign to adventurers a fat share of other men's
goods, to create a class legally owning the land, and entitled, in
virtue of that ownership, to a share of the cattle and crops which they
had done nothing to produce.

The Stuarts were at this very time sowing the seeds of civil war in
England by the introduction of like abuses, the story of which has been
repeatedly told; and we are all familiar with the history of the great
uprising which was thereby provoked, to the temporary eclipse of the
power of the crown. The story of the like uprising at the same epoch,
and from kindred causes, in Ireland, is much more obscure, but equally
worth recording, and to this upr