In the early middle ages Clamecy belonged to the abbey of St Julian at Auxerre; in the 11th century it passed to the counts of Nevers, one of whom, Hervé, enfranchised the inhabitants in 1213. After the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1188, Clamecy became the seat of the bishops of Bethlehem, who till the Revolution resided in the hospital of Panthenor, bequeathed by William IV., count of Nevers. On the _coup d'état_ of 1851 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 _síl, siol_, seed e.g. _Siol Alpine_, a great clan which included the smaller clans of the Macgregors, Grants, Mackinnons, Macnabs, Macphies, Macquarries and Macaulays.