Tanistry
idea · 2 works · 5 mentions · 15 anchored passages
course of Tanistry · the Tanaists
in the texts
Lectures on the Early History of Institutions
The Irish institution of elective succession to chieftainship, paralleling elective succession among the Druids.
The Tanaists of the great Irish Chiefs, the successors elected out of the kindred of each Chief to come after him on his death, are said to have occasionally officiated as judges;
’ The mode of choosing the chief Druid, by election, has its counterpart in the institution of Tanistry, which within historical times determined the succession to all high office in Ireland, and which was hateful to the English, as affording smaller security for order than their own less archaic form of primogeniture.
The Judges treated both Tanistry and Gavelkind as systems of succession after death, of a peculiarly barbarous and mischievous kind;
Dissertations on Early Law and Custom
The system of succession by the eldest surviving male kinsman rather than direct descent, named for its Irish origin.
The system which I have described, that under which not the eldest son but the eldest male kinsman succeeds, now bears very generally the name of Tanistry, from the Celtic word which points to its practice in ancient Ireland.
I have already called it Tanistry, the system under which the grown men of the tribe elect their own chief, generally choosing a successor before the ruling chief dies, and almost invariably electing his brother or nearest mature male relative.
If then we avert our eyes from the ideas about chiefship and kingship entertained by barbarous races—ideas generally associated with some form of the system which I have called Tanistry—and if we look to their ideas concerning the inheritance of property, we find the same uncertainty and difference of view about the right of women to succeed to it which we observe in the feudal monarchies.