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Early Irish kingship was sacral in character. In the early narrative literature a king is a king because he marries the sovereignty goddess, is free from blemish, enforces symbolic buada (prerogatives) and avoids symbolic gessa ( taboos). According to the seventh and eighth century law tracts a hierarchy of kingship and clientship progressed from the rí (king of a single petty kingdom) through the ruiri (a rí who was overking of several petty kingdoms) to a rí ruirech (a rí who was a provincial overking). Each king ruled directly only within the bounds of his own petty kingdom and was responsible for ensuring good government by exercising fír flaithemon (rulers truth), convening its óenach (popular assembly), raising taxes, public works, external relations, defence, emergency legislation, law enforcement and promulgating legal judgement. The lands within the petty kingdom were held allodially by various fine (agnatic kingroups) of freemen with the king occupying the apex of a pyramid of clientship within the petty kingdom (progressing from the unfree population at its base up to the heads of noble fine held in immediate clientship by the king) and so being drawn from the dominant fine within the cenél (a wider kingroup encompassing the noble fine of the petty kingdom).
Even at the time the law tracts were being written these petty kingdoms were being swept away by newly emerging dynasties of dynamic overkings. The most successful of these dynasties were the Uí Néill (encompassing descendants of Niall of the Nine Hostages such as the Cenel Eoghain) who as kings of Tara had been conquering petty kingdoms, expelling their rulers and agglomerating their territories under the direct rule of their expanding kindred since the fifth century. Native and foreign, pagan and christian ideas were comingled to form a new idea of Irish kingship. The native idea of a sacred kingship was integrated with the christian idea in the ceremony of coronation, the relationship of king to overking became one of tigerna (lord) to king and imperium ( sovereigntySovereignty is the exclusive right to exercise supreme authority over a geographic region or group of people, such as a nation or a tribe. Sovereignty is generally vested in a government or other political agency, though there are cases where it is held b) began to merge with dominium (ownership). The church was well disposed to the idea of a strong political authority. Its clerics developed the theory of a high kingship of Ireland and wrote tracts exhorting kings to rule rather than reign. In return the paruchiae (monastic federations) of the Irish church received royal patronage in the form of shrines, building works, land and protection.
The concept of a high kingship was converted into political reality by the Uí Néill in 862Events Rurik gained control of Novgorod. Fan Chuo finishes his Manchu ("book of the southern tribes"). Lothair, king of Lotharia divorces Teutberga and marries Waldrada. First written record of Murom. Births Deaths 2 July: St. Swithun, bishop of Wincheste when one of their number is styled in the annals as rí Érenn uile (king of all Ireland), but this was a personal kingship to be won anew generation by generation rather than an impersonal office settled upon a lineage. By the twelfth century the dual process of agglomeration of territory and consolidation of kingship saw the handful of remaining provincial kings abandoning the traditional royal sites for the cities, employing ministers and governors, receiving advice from an oireacht (a body of noble counsellors), presiding at reforming synods and maintaining standing armies. Early royal succession had been by alternation between collateral branches of the wider dynasty but succession was now confined to a series of father/son, brother/brother and uncle/nephew successions within a small royal fine marked by an exclusive surname. These compact families (O Brien of Munster, MacLochlainn of the North, O Connor of Connacht) intermarried and competed against each other on a national basis so that on the eve of the Anglo-Norman incursion of 1169 we find the agglomeration/consolidation process complete and their provincial kingdoms divided, dismembered and transformed into fiefdoms held from (or in rebellion against) one of their number acting as king of Ireland.
See also List of High Kings of IrelandThe High Kingship of Ireland was a pseudohistorical construct of the eighth century projected into the distant past that did not become political reality until the ninth century. The traditional list of High Kings of Ireland is thus a mixture of fact and