sh kinsmen in
Scotland, were organised on the system of mother-right, in which
property and descent and kinship are all traced through the maternal
side of the ancestry. Throughout the _Lives_, Beoit is a cypher: the
house and its contents and appurtenances are almost invariably treated
as Darerca's property. Matriarchate usually implies exogamy, a man
choosing his wife from a sept differing from his own; and the
children are related to the mother's, not the father's kin. The male
responsible for the education of the child is not so much the father
as the maternal uncle. The law of exogamy was strictly followed in the
case before us. Beoit comes from north-east Ulster; Darerca belonged
to a family which drew its origin from the south-east of the present
county Kerry, though she seems to have settled in Cenel Fiachach at
the time when Beoit met her. Incidents VIII and X of Ciaran's Life are
laid in that territory, which falls in with a tradition, presently to
be noted, that the dwelling-place of the family of the saint was not
Raith Cremthainn, but the place where the parents had first met--which
would be an instance of the husband dwelling with the wife's people,
as is frequent under the matriarchate. The Celtic authors of the
_Lives_ have transferred the kinship of the son to the father's clan,
in accordance with their own social system; but an older tradition has
left an unmistakable trace in the confusion of the relationships of
"father" and "uncle" in LA, Sec.Sec. 9, 10.

It is possible that the prominence of the mother in the household,
and Ciaran's birth away from his ancestral home as the result of
a taxation, are specially emphasised because they offer obvious
parallels with the Gospel story. The character of Darerca is, however,
by no means idealised, as we might have expected it to be, had this
been the chief purpose of the narrator.

_The Parents of Ciaran, their Names and Origins._--The name of
Ciaran's father is variously Latinised in the Latin Lives. The Irish
lives call him Beoit, a name analysed in the _Book of Leinster_, p.
349, into _Beo-n-Aed_, which would mean something like "Living Fire."
The _-n-_ is inserted, according to a law of Old Irish accidence,
because _aed_, "fire," is a neuter word. Thus arises the Latin form
_Beonnadus_. By metathesis the name further becomes transformed to
_Beodan_ or _Beoan_. The _Latharna_ were the people who dwelt around
the site of the modern town of _Larne_, whic