Chief of the Name

The Chief of the Name, or in older English usage Captain of his Nation, is the recognised head of a family or clan (clann in Irish and Scottish Gaelic). The term is in use as a title in Ireland and Scotland where Gaelic traditions still survive.

In Elizabethan times, the position of Chief of the Name was more important to some Irish leaders than English titles. There are instances where Norman lords of the time like FitzGerald, took to using the Gaelic style of "The" or "Mór" (great) to indicate that the individual was the primary person of his family in Ireland.

In the Tudor period the Kingdom of Ireland was established in 1542, and many of the former autonomous clan chiefs were assimilated under the English legal system via the policy of surrender and regrant. At the same time numerous mentions were made in official records of locally-powerful landlords described as "chief of his nation", i.e. head of a family, whether assimilated or not. Attempts were made by the English to make each "chief" responsible for the good behaviour of the rest of his family and followers. The Gaelic practice was for such a man to sign himself by the family surname only. A new practice arose where the English version of the surname was in many instances prefixed by "The", and so for example the head of the Mac Aonghusa clan in County Down would sign as "Mac Aonghusa" in Irish, and as "The " in English.

The downfall of the Gaelic order in the early 17th century led to a decline of the power of the Chiefs. Plantation efforts, the Wars of Cromwell and King James, meant that by the end of the 17th century, most of the Chiefships of the Name were living outside Ireland, reduced to poverty, or lost forever.

Thereafter, those former kings or chiefs who had been assimilated under the English legal system passed their titles down by primogeniture, whereas the usual Irish practice in the Middle Ages was to elect a chief from a group of close cousins known as a derbfine. Some chiefs did not assimilate under the English legal system, but relied on the system of succession provided for under Irish Brehon Law. The lineages of assimilated chiefs were usually recorded by the Herald's Office in Dublin Castle, set up in 1552, not least because many clans in the 16th and 17th centuries had been persuaded to enter the English-law system under the policy of surrender and regrant. Other manuscript genealogies were preserved and published in the 18th century by Charles O'Conor and Sylvester O'Halloran. The Irish nationalist and republican movements that developed after 1850 often harked back emotively to the former chiefs' losses, but without ever suggesting that they be reinstated.

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