The Ancient Irish Brehon Law: The Promise of Sameness

Abstract

The ancient Irish Brehon Law guided tribal Celtic populations of Ireland and parts of Scotland for perhaps 1000 years, conveyed in an oral tradition of poem and story and later in written manuscript until the final English subjugation of Ireland (Eire) in the Seventeenth Century. It was named for its guardians and exponents, a roving class of lawyers whose disposition of disputes brought before them were the warp and woof of civil order in an island organized in clans, with no coherent, indivisible state. Brehon Law did not derive from the jus civile of Rome or Romanized Western Europe but rather from a broader jus naturale of fundamental and universal ideas of right and wrong that have influenced man from time before time. Beginning in earnest with the Norman Invasions of 1169 and 1171 A.D., the English in Ireland were a true army of occupation, imposing Tudor ecclesiastic, civil and criminal law throughout the realm. Not content to permit English law to govern the population centers while co-existing with what they viewed as the uncouth pagan law of the Brehons in the countryside, while inventing for these populations and their culture the phrase “beyond the pale”, the Anglo-Normans sought to extirpate Brehon Law, and more generally Gaelic culture, root and branch. Teaching or adhering to Brehon Law was flatly prohibited, and even possession of Brehon manuscripts was a crime, but samizdat transcription and dissemination continued. Nonetheless, as a consequence of English suppression, many of the manuscripts were secreted underground and suffered damage or total loss. The general mistreatment of the Irish was accented by active English dragnets in search of all vestiges of Brehon law, including martial excavations of sites suspected of hiding Brehon writings. Brehon Ireland was a great cultural experiment in which Brehon judges, by trial and error and with their multitude of glossators. cultivated a corpus of law that was ever perfecting itself by accretion, as does a coral reef. Brehon Law was true living law, first pagan, and then Catholic, until it was torn asunder under Tudor England.