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an insurrection broke out in the town, and was repressed by the new
authorities with great severity.

CLAN (Gaelic _clann_, O. Ir. _cland_, connected with Lat. _planta_,
shoot or scion, the ancient Gaelic or Goidelic substituting k for p), a
group of people united by common blood, and usually settled in a common
habitat. The clan system existed in Ireland and the Highlands of
Scotland from early times. In its strictest sense the system was
peculiar to those countries, but, in its wider meaning of a group of
kinsmen forming a self-governing community, the system as represented by
the village community has been shown by Sir H. Maine and others to have
existed at one time or another in all lands.

Before the use of surnames and elaborate written genealogies, a tribe in
its definite sense was called in Celtic a _tuath_, a word of wide
affinities, from a root _tu_, to grow, to multiply, existing in all
European languages. When the tribal system began to be broken up by
conquest and by the rise of towns and of territorial government, the use
of a common surname furnished a new bond for keeping up a connexion
between kindred. The head of a tribe or smaller group of kindred
selected some ancestor and called himself his _Ua_, grandson, or as it
has been anglicized _O', e.g. Ua Conchobair_ (O' Conor), _Ua
Suilleabhain_ (O'Sullivan). All his kindred adopted the same name, the
chief using no fore-name however. The usual mode of distinguishing a
person before the introduction of surnames was to name his father and
grandfather, e.g. Owen, son of Donal, son of Dermot. This naturally
led some to form their surnames with _Mac_, son, instead of _Ua_,
grandson, e.g. _MacCarthaigh_, son of _Carthach_ (MacCarthy),
_MacRuaidhri_, son of Rory (Macrory). Both methods have been followed in
Ireland, but in Scotland _Mac_ came to be exclusively used. The adoption
of such genealogical surnames fostered the notion that all who bore the
same surname were kinsmen, and hence the genealogical term _clann_,
which properly means the descendants of some progenitor, gradually
became synonymous with _tuath_, tribe. Like all purely genealogical
terms, _clann_ may be used in the limited sense of a particular tribe
governed by a chief, or in that of many tribes claiming descent from a
common ancestor. In the latter sense it was synonymous with _sil, siol_,
seed e.g. _Siol Alpine_, a great clan which included the smaller clans
of the Macgregors, Gran