Gaelic society was a very hierarchical society: the lord was a very powerful individual within that society and he employed propagandists to prop up his power. It was a war-based society so military strength / ambition was important because if you were going to promote your cause, you had to be ambitious, you had to be prepared to fight your case against others, you had to earn your political position. If you didn’t fulfil the role that a lord was expected to fulfil, which of course included protection of your followers (that was a basic function), if you didn’t fulfil that role, well somebody else would. So, in that way it was a very unstable society because it was always possible that a lord would be overthrown by a rival from within his own lordship. Much of the disputes and instability within Gaelic society came from within individual lordships rather than between lordships.

Q: - And do we have any knowledge of how many lordships there would have been in Gaelic Ireland?

Yes, well there are various layers and levels of lordships: there are the great overlords like O’Neill and O’Donnell in Ulster; others (major, powerful, influential ones) in south Ulster would have been the Maguires and the O’Reillys. But then there were lots of other lesser families who had power to a greater or lesser degree in fairly confined geographical areas. No, there’s no way of putting a figure on the total number of lordships in Gaelic Ireland and the boundaries were always fluid so it’s very difficult to mark these places on a map and say ‘that’s how it was’ at even at one point in time. One would get the impression from reading some traditional sources, that Gaelic society was a very static society, almost frozen in time. The reality, in late-16th-century Ireland is that Gaelic society was a very fluid society, constantly changing. The more powerful lords tended to get more and more powerful: the weaker ones just went to the wall and disappeared.