Kin-land held in common, law kept by memory, and a poet paid as much as a smith.
Ní neart go cur le chéile — there is no strength without togetherness.
The household
The derbfine — four generations of one great-grandfather held the land together; a name (Ó, Mac) was a legal address, not decoration.
The trade
Smiths, harpers, brehons (judges) and poets were graded professions with fixed honour-price; a craft was inherited and examined.
1300s
Two systems ran side by side: brehon law in the kin-lands, and Anglo-Norman borough charters in Dublin, Drogheda, Galway and Kilkenny where merchant guilds held the market.
Wealth was measured in cattle, not coin. A household's standing was what it could feed and foster — fosterage placed a child in another house to be taught a trade and to bind two families for life.
1400s
Hundreds of tower houses went up — a family fortress with a hall above the store. The ground floor was the business; the upper floor was the household. The building itself was the pattern: keep the goods, keep the people, keep the line.
Galway's fourteen merchant tribes traded wine, hides and fish with Spain and Bordeaux. A daughter's marriage was a trade route.
1500s
Craft guilds of Dublin — smiths, tailors, weavers, bakers — set the standard of the work, the length of the apprenticeship, and the care of a widow whose husband's bench went quiet.
Surrender and regrant turned chiefs into titled lords and put the old kin-land under English inheritance. Names were written down — which is why the records begin to survive.
Free books
The honour-price of each craft, in translation.
CELT: the full Irish corpus, free text you can paste into your Library.
Copy a chapter and shelve it in your Library — the Pearl quotes it from then on, with no tokens spent.
