The early Irish law texts, the central source for the Celtic law and the Brehon tradition cluster within the broader Celtic society, law, and governance survey, are the largest body of indigenous European law to survive from before the modern period. Written in a technical Old Irish, layered with centuries of commentary, and structured around a system of classification that the medieval jurists spent whole careers trying to master, they preserve the working knowledge of the brithemain, the professional judges of early medieval Ireland.
The Senchas Már and the Great Tradition
The most important of the early Irish law texts is the Senchas Már, the “Great Tradition,” a collection of legal tracts attributed in the medieval prologue to a legendary commission of nine scholars appointed by the high king of Ireland in the fifth century. The historical commission never existed, and the texts themselves were clearly composed over a long period, with the earliest strata dating from the seventh and eighth centuries CE and the latest glosses added in the twelfth and thirteenth. The Senchas Már is a library rather than a single book, and it covers the whole field of Irish law: distress and contract, marriage and inheritance, procedure and evidence, status and rank, the family and the kin group.
The contents are arranged in a number of sub-tracts. The Cáin Lánamna deals with the law of marriage. The Bechbretha deals with the law of bees and the ownership of swarms, a small but characteristic corner of the early Irish law of property. The Maccath and the Cairde deal with the law of contract and the formation of partnerships. The Corus Béscnai deals with the law of the household. The combination of the grand and the domestic gives the Senchas Már its distinctive character.
The Críth Gablach and the Grades of Society
The Críth Gablach or “Branched Purchase” is the principal text on the grades of Irish society. A tract of the eighth or ninth century, it sets out, in considerable detail, the seven grades of the flaith or nobility and the various grades of the common people, the honor price of each, the obligations of each to the king, the number of followers expected of each, the kind of house each was entitled to, and the kind of death each was entitled to die. The Críth Gablach important sources for the social structure of early medieval Ireland, and it complements the Senchas Már by giving a more concrete picture of the people whose relationships the Senchas Már was designed to regulate.
The Críth Gablach was, in effect, a kind of social constitution. It assigned to each grade a specific honor price, a specific obligation to attend the assembly of the tuath, a specific obligation to provide hospitality to the king, and a specific obligation to serve in the military host. The text is one of the principal sources for the Celtic tribal organization of early medieval Ireland, and it shows the close connection between the Celtic legal tradition and the political structure within which it operated.
The Cáin Lánamna and the Law of Marriage
The Cáin Lánamna, the “Law of Marriage,” famous tracts in the Senchas Már and one of the most important sources for the legal position of women in early medieval Ireland. The text sets out, in considerable detail, the seven forms of marriage recognised by Irish law, the property relations of husband and wife under each form, the grounds for divorce, and the rights of the parties on dissolution. The text is the principal source for the women in Celtic society of the early medieval period, and it is the foundation of much of the modern scholarly discussion of women in early Celtic law.
The Cáin Lánamna distinguishes, in order of dignity, the lánamnas comthinchuir or equal marriage, in which the husband and wife brought equal property and the wife’s property remained her own; the lánamnas for ferthinchur in which the wife brought more; the lánamnas for bantinchur in which the husband brought more; and several further forms in which the relation was essentially concubinage. Each form had its own rules of property and inheritance. The whole text shows a legal system in which the rights of women were more carefully articulated than in almost any other contemporary European legal system.
The Bretha Crólige, the Heptad, and the Tracts on Distress
Around the Senchas Már proper is a wider literature: the Bretha Crólige or “judgments of blood-lying,” which deals with compensation for killing, the éraic and the crólige payments; the Heptad, a group of seven tracts on contract; the Di Chetharslicht Athgabálae, a tract on distress; and other texts on specific aspects of the law. The Bretha Crólige, in particular, is one of the most sophisticated of the early Irish legal texts, and it sets out the principles on which compensation for killing was calculated and the liability of the kin.
The tracts on distress set out the procedure by which a creditor could seize the property of a debtor in order to enforce a judgment. The procedure was extraordinarily elaborate, and the texts distinguish between a dozen different kinds of distraint, each with its own formal requirements and its own legal consequences. The whole body of law, taken together, gives a picture of a working legal system that had been refined over centuries of judicial practice, and it important legacies of the history of the Celtic civilization.
The Glosses, the Commentaries, and the Layers of the Tradition
The early law texts did not stand alone. They were copied and recopied, and a substantial body of commentary, gloss, and case law accumulated around them. The most important of the glossing traditions is the Breslech or “Judgment of Selection,” a body of material preserved in the margins of the Senchas Már and other law texts. The Breslech contains explanations, alternative readings, hypothetical cases, and references to the decisions of named brithemain on disputed points. The commentaries were added in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, and they continued to be added until the seventeenth century.
The result is a layered document in which the older core of the seventh and eighth centuries is overlaid by centuries of later commentary. The work of scholars such as Rudolf Thurneysen, D. A. Binchy, and Fergus Kelly has done much to disentangle the layers. The glosses are themselves an important source for the later development of the law, and they show a living legal tradition that continued to develop long after the older core had been fixed. The whole tradition is the foundation of the Celtic legacy today of legal scholarship, and it is one of the great achievements of the early medieval Celtic world.
Related Topics
- The Celtic law and the Brehon tradition cluster gives an overview of the major principles of the Brehon law.
- The Celtic tribal organization cluster describes the political units within which the law texts were produced and applied.
- The women in Celtic society cluster examines the position of women under the Cáin Lánamna and the other marriage tracts.
- The history of the Celtic civilization pillar provides the chronological and political context of the texts.
- The Celtic languages and oral tradition pillar sets out the linguistic background of the Old Irish in which the texts were written.