Na Déise
The Déise · the client people, from déis, a vassal or rent paying tenant
Na Déise, in English The Déise, said nah DAY-sheh. A people.
Waterford and south Tipperary. A people named for their rank rather than their blood, and the only one of these names still shouted at a hurling match.
The name
the client people, from déis, a vassal or rent paying tenant
Where
Most of modern Waterford and the south of Tipperary, roughly the ground covered today by the diocese of Waterford and Lismore.
In today's counties: Waterford (Port Láirge), Tipperary (Tiobraid Árann).
When it mattered
A vassal kingdom under the kings of Cashel, from about the fifth century until the Normans came.
Almost every Irish people is named after an ancestor. The Uí Néill are the descendants of Niall, the Eóganachta of Eógan. The Déise are not. The word is déis, meaning a client or a rent paying tenant, so the name describes a position in somebody else's world: the vassals. Groups called Déise turn up in several parts of Ireland with no kinship between them at all, because the word was a rank before it was ever a people.
The Déise of Munster made the best of it. They held the south coast as a kingdom under the Eóganachta of Cashel, and their ruling family were the Ó Faoláin. After 1170 the Normans took the harbours and the lowlands, and de Paor, the name we now say as Power, became the commonest name in the county and has stayed that way.
There is a second Déise worth knowing about. The Dál gCais, the people who produced Brian Bóruma, were earlier called the Déis Tuaiscirt, the northern Déise. The family that went on to claim the high kingship of Ireland started out carrying the same word for vassal.
Where the usual story goes wrong
A medieval tale called The Expulsion of the Déisi has them driven out of Meath near Tara and marching south to Munster. It is a good story and it is not history. Scholars read it as a pedigree written backwards, composed after the Déise had power and wanted a grander beginning than rent paying.
What is left of the name
Waterford teams are still the Déise. The baronies of Decies within Drum and Decies without Drum carry the name in its English spelling, worn down by four centuries of clerks.
Names out of it
Families on this site that belong to The Déise. A surname is not a pedigree, and plenty of people carry these names for reasons that have nothing to do with the old kingdom.
Next to it
- Na hEóganachta (The Eóganachta)
- Dál gCais (The Dalcassians)
- Osraige (Ossory)
- Deasmhumhain (Desmond)