Lost and Found in Early Irish Law

INTRODUCTION The historical roots of early Irish law stretch back into antiquity and were passed on in the rich oral history, poetry, sagas, law and wisdom-texts, that have come down to us. The body of law is frequently referred to as Brehon Law, so-called as it was applied by judges named breitheamhuin or brehons, in the Irish language. The more appropriate term is fenechas defined as ‘law of the Feni [freemen], customary or traditional law, [or] native law’. Promulgated or written law, much of it developed by the church, was known as Cain law. The primary old Irish law-text is the Senchas Mar (great tradition). This grounding document constitutes a third of all surviving law-texts. Reputedly originally assembled at the insistence of St. Patrick in the fifth century of the common era (CE), the Senchas Mar as we now know it was compiled in the seventh century CE and brings together a number of distinct texts, addressing a range of civil and political as well as economic and social matters. An understanding of old Irish law also requires recourse to a wide range of other law-texts, as well as oral tradition captured in the sagas, poems and wisdom-texts. Law-texts on issues as diverse as the law of bee-keeping, the status of poets (who were key to the learning and transmission of the law), the principal remedies for civil and criminal harm, and canon law demonstrate the breadth and depth of old Irish law. Although law in Ireland was not primarily legislative or king-made there was long tradition of national and local assemblies, such as the Feis of Tara, which may have served to ‘preserve [customary] laws and rules’. While kings could issue ordinances in times of emergency, law was primarily derived from custom and was found and interpreted by the legal class (poets and brehons) with strong clerical influences — an influence probably exercised by druids in earlier times. Though justice was primarily adjudicated by brehons, kings were linked to the process and may have adjudicated certain cases and/or played a role in approving the decision of a brehon. The Senchas Mar shows the significant influence of the church in revision of the law and may be seen as the end result of a collaborative process to reconcile ‘native oral custom with written Christian doctrine’.

Gender & History the thought of the Anglo-Saxon monastic theorist Aldhelm (c.639-709), for example, religious men and women partook, in Emma Pettit's words, of a 'shared invisible spiritual identity heavily indebted to masculinity'. Monks and nuns alike were enjoined to contend 'manfully ' (viriliter) in the battle against vices. The visible dimensions of religious life, however, from dress to demeanour, retained clear gender distinctions, and for Aldhelm the transition to religious life entailed a more dramatic break for men than for women. Elsewhere, hagiographers drew on different models of sanctity in characterising the transition to female religious life, from the transcending of gender through virile asceticism to the transformation of gender through spiritualised motherhood. Often, as Simon Coates has shown in his study of the vitae of the sixth-century abbess Radegund of Poitiers, hagiographers blended elements from these models. cross the diversity of early medieval models of sanctity (and their modern interpretations), chastity was a crucial sign of religious distinction. But chastity was also fragile, an 'unstable condition and easily lost among the pitfalls of the world'. From early Christianity onwards, sexual lapses were rude reminders to individuals and communities of the gender roles which religious orientation sought to reconfigure. When, in the early third century, Tertullian critiqued an emergent custom in Carthage for virgins who had renounced marriage to stand unveiled in church, he noted acerbically that after uncovering their heads many ended up covering their bellies in shame or resorting to abortion to prevent public disclosure of sexual sin. 9 From punitive retribution to the remedy of penance, responses to such lapses endeavoured to recover the communal experience of chastity and to contain the turbulence of sexual sin in communities of the chaste.

Although the surviving written texts must be our evidence, they are not identical with the subject to be investigated. The great bulk of legal activity was oral, and on this the written sources often shed only an indirect light. In spite of this difficulty, however, we must be concerned with the totality, both written and unwritten, since otherwise explanation will be impossible. It will also be necessary to examine the principal Irish text of canon law, the ‘Collectio canonum Hibernensis’. I shall refer to the vernacular texts as native Irish law or as secular Irish law.

abstract: This article concerns the fragmentarily attested early Irish legal text Fidbretha ‘Tree-Judgments’. Although this text is often mentioned by scholars of early Irish law as an important source of information about early Irish trees, no edition or translation of the text has been published thus far. Fidbretha is compared with other sources related to trees and forests and an edition and translation of the text appears in the Appendix.

Early Irish law texts appear frequently to draw upon a particular numerical series. The numbers in this series are 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 30. In status texts this series is supplemented by the numbers 2, 20, 42. A method for generating these numbes is suggested. This method also provides a solution to anomalies in the ordering of grades in some texts.

This volume contains a critical edition of the Old Irish law tract Corus Besgnai(The Arrangement of Discipline), one of the constituent tracts of the late seventh-century compilation Senchas Mar(The Great Tradition). It has taken the editor a very long time to bring this work to completion, but the result is a highly accurate and informative edition representing the highest standard of scholarship in early Irish language and law.

The fragmentary nature of evidence for the Early Christian period makes an interdisciplinary approach essential for the reconstruction of past landscapes and settlement patterns.1 Despite the efforts of the Group for the Study of Irish Historical Settlement to foster interdisciplinary links, much modern research remains unconcerned with the need to present an integrated understanding of the past.2 Would-be practitioners of a multidisciplinary approach may have been discouraged by the hostile reception which greeted Smyth’s innovative contributions to Early Christian studies.3 Although one such critic professed ‘unqualified admiration’ for his multidisciplinary approach,4 Smyth was attacked for his dependence on secondary sources, especially his reliance on Ancient Laws of Ireland, the flawed Victorian English-language translation of early Irish law. More importantly, Smyth was justifiably admonished for minimising the importance of early Irish law as a source for settlement history.5Would these attacks have been less virulent, and shorter, if the academic in question had not strayed beyond the boundaries of his core discipline? In another instance illustrating the pitfalls of interdisciplinary research, considerable space has been given by an archaeologist to changes in the social hierarchy of the period based on an outdated theory from the field of Early Irish Law.6Thus, multidisciplinarians become uneasy consumers of a published product beyond their individual expertise, of works whose limitations are often known only to those at the core of individual disciplines. Despite these inherent dangers, this chapter reviews recent developments in a wide range of specialisms which have improved our understanding of Early Christian settlement.

In contrast to modern Western society's treatment of plants as non-sentient beings to be used or killed at will for our own benefit, the complex legal system used in Ireland from prehistory up until the 17th century delineated penalties for mistreating trees that were not dissimilar to the penalties for mistreating other humans. The early Irish relationship with trees as described in Brehon Law and extant lore was not only utilitarian but also deeply spiritual and tied to the peoples' identity. Brehon Law provides an example from European history that illustrates traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and animistic relationships with the more-than-human world of nature. This paper explores some ecopsychological and environmental benefits of applying its principles today.

It has long been noted that in early Irish society there appear to be seven-fold divisions of status within the classes of freemen and filid ('seers' or 'poets') which seem to be in imitation of the seven Holy Orders of the Church. The division of the clergy into seven grades is evidenced at least as early as the third century. They were normally: porter, lector, exorcist, acolyte, sub-deacon, deacon and priest. The bishop was not usually considered to be sufficiently distinct from the priest to rank as a separate order.

Thurneysen, Rudolf (1857–1940)

The Early Middle Irish Adam and Eve story in the tenth- or eleventh-century biblical poem Saltair na Rann includes an exchange between the devil and the snake in paradise. The devil seeks to persuade the snake to corporeal cohabitation in order to further his desire to bring about the fall of Eve and Adam. Lucifer's argument to the snake stresses the snake's hierarchical superiority to Adam, an idea that, as Brian Murdoch points out in his commentary on the poem, 'is a simple reprise of Lucifer's' earlier argument against subservience to God.1 But Lucifer's encouragement of the snake is capped by the singular plea, 'denamm cotach is carddess' ('let us make a bargain and treaty') (lines 1150).2 To this, the pragmatic serpent responds, 'Cia luag nom tha, fiad each thur / ... ar failti duit im churp chain, / cen nach locht dom chomaittreib?' ('What reward have I, before every host ... for welcoming you into my fair body, to live together with me without any fault?') (lines 1165-8). The reply: fame. The devil cunningly promises that his union with the snake will 'be continuously mentioned' in ages to come ('bid do gres ar n-anmnigud', line 1176).3 The devil offers an assurance partly based on form. The language he uses, in referring to making a treaty or a proper arrangement, or an alliance - however one translates 'cotach' - elevates the discussion to a formal level, as he offers the snake a verbal contract: if you will do this for me, I will assure you of this result, or, you give me that, and I will give you this.4 The legalistic language of the encounter marks a convention in perception of the Fall, one visible in another early medieval Insular poem on the Fall, the perhaps tenth-century Old English Genesis B, and in legal texts themselves.5The Fall has a long history of reference in law, the Irish aspects of which Damian Bracken explores in his study of 'The Fall and the law in early Ireland'. Bracken demonstrates that 'clerics with an interest in the explanations of the opening of Genesis were involved in writing the laws of early Ireland' and that lawyers subsequently maintained a 'very practical use of the theology of the Fall', using it as a prime example:The Fall and its consequences are the basis for discussion of matters like free will and perhaps that most Christian of ideals - the attempt to go beyond law and its technicalities to a psychological consideration of motive and intent. The early lawyers use the theology of the Fall in just this context: whether the accused was incited to commit the crime, whether he committed the crime with malice aforethought, whether he was fully aware of all circumstances before entering into an agreement.6Texts concerning the rules of contracts demonstrate especially well this practical applicability in a central area of the law. Fergus Kelly in his study of early Irish law asserts that 'The commonest legal act in early Irish society was no doubt the verbal contract or cor bel (lit. putting of lips) often referred to simply as cor. This term covers all commercial undertakings, as well as agreements to marry, to foster, to engage in co-operative farming, to enter clientship,' and so on.7 One collection of early Irish texts on contracts, what Neil McLeod identifies as 'perhaps the central text on the subject', is Di Astud Chor, On the securing of Contracts', which McLeod dates to the eighth century, at least in the compilation as it now exists.8 Perhaps the best known and the largest of surviving Old Irish legal texts is, however, the Senchas Mar, or 'Great Tradition', which has a substantial introduction that has also been dated to 'probably' the eighth century, though at least part of it pre-dates Di Astud Chor? Both Di Astud Chor and the introduction to the Senchas Mar utilize references to Lucifer's and to Adam and Eve's fall to confirm a legal point, while both poetic treatments of the Fall, the Early Middle Irish Saltair na Rann and the Old English Genesis B, employ contractual language similar to that in the law texts. …

Early Christian Ireland was a highly inegalitarian society. Indeed, the original Introduction to the Senchas Mar expressed horror at the very notion of social equality. Yet, although status was all-important, the early Irish laws explicitly recognised that there were several ways to achieve high rank. This acknowledgement that there were different sources of high status made it much easier to give a high social value to verbal and artistic skills and to learning; for that reason, the approach to status was a principal foundation-stone of early Irish culture. As we shall see, the treatment of the subject in the laws suggests that men whose own claim to high rank was through their learning used that very same learning to impose a comprehensive view of social status. In any inegalitarian society there is a need to have a comprehensive hierarchy of status, namely a system by which one person's status can be related to anyone else's. If rank is a essential part of any person's social identity, no one can be left outside the system. When someone was injured or killed, compensation was due, and the value of the compensation, including the conditions in which an injured person was treated, depended on the status of the victim and the rank of his kinsmen and lord. But if there is division of labour and therefore diversity of social function, the different functions performed by people are likely to be incommensurable.

Ireland on a Plate: Curating the 2011 State Banquet for Queen Elizabeth II

Early Irish Literature and Law (2006–7)

Early Irish Law : the present state of research. The author discusses the developments in the study of Early Irish Law since the publication of D. A. Binchy’s six-volume Corpus Iuris Hibernici in 1978. He deals in particular with the aims of the Early Irish Law Series, in which three volumes have already been published, and discusses current thinking on the problem of the authorship of the law-texts.