In the eighth century it becomes possible to analyse in some detail how Irish kingship worked. Three texts show, for example, what privileges client-kings hoped to gain from their overlords. Moreover, origin-legends help to put them in their proper context – to understand not just the claims themselves but the stories that justified them and placed them within the total narrative of the island of Ireland. One of these three texts we have met already, the poem on the Airgíalla to which the story of ‘The Three Collas’ provided the supporting narrative. The other two both come from Munster. One, the West Munster Synod, is a half-royal, half-ecclesiastical narrative designed to justify a rebellion by a group of West Munster kingdoms, led by the Cíarraige Lúachra, against their immediate overlord, the king of West Munster, who was of the Éoganacht Locha Léin. The other text is the Frithfolad Muman, ‘The Counter-Obligations of Munster’. Here, too, claims are made on behalf of client kingdoms, but in this instance the overking in question is the king of Munster with his royal seat at Cashel. The counter-obligations in question are owed by the king of Munster to his client-kingdoms in return for the obligations they have to him. In this text, therefore, there is no intention, as there was in the West Munster Synod, to deny or at least sharply reduce the power of the overlord.