Brehon Law

*Brehon Law
*http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02753a.htm

I'm submitting this article first, and am making an axiomatic assumption
that possession of Ireland was imperative to English policy. I'm
currently gathering information to try to prove this point. I feel that,
during the Wars of the Roses, the Irish question was a constant problem
that is obscured behind the well-known events with which we are
familiar. The purpose of this submission is to demonstrate why Brehon
law was a threat to English sensibilities.

One of the main sources of conflict between the Irish and their English
counterparts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was the
insistence by the English that the Irish follow English common law
practices as opposed to the ancient Brehon legal system that likely had
its beginnings in times predating the Celtic conquests. The Irish
refusal to follow English customs, including the English legal system,
led to the Statute of Kilkenny and to other measures designed to nullify
Irish cultural influence. Here is an outline of Irish legal history as
it pertains to Brehon law.

Talking Points:

* The Irish took great pride in the the depth of their heritage. It
seems to me that they viewed their institutions as being more
ancient; therefore, more legitimate and honourable than English
institutions. The Norman settlers seem also to have viewed Irish
institutions in this light within several generations of their
arrival in Irealnd. This sense of superiority likely galled the
English, who, I assume, saw themselves as morally and culturally
superior to 'Irish barbarians'.
* Irish land ownership was vest in the tribe, as opposed to being
vest in the individual. The English establishment based its
legitimacy on the ability to amass private property. English
gentry and aristocracy spent generations gathering lands and
titles through which they might enhance their social and economic
circumstances. To the English, the Irish system of ownership would
strip the individual of the means to pursue self-interest. And the
English crown certainly didn't want to give up any more power than
it had already given to parliament.
* It's interesting that, in Ireland, debt was linked to chattels
deposited by the chief with tenants, rather than than to the
tenants' occupation of land. This situation might be a little too
democratic for English tastes.
* It seems to me that the Irish family structure was more stable
than the English system of primogeniture; however, it would likely
be anathema to the English, who wished to keep inheritance as
close to direct bloodline as possible. Interesting that the Irish
chief has to both act and look like a chief. If you're weak or
unpopular, you're out.
* The concept of honour price was certainly the rule among most of
the tribal societies of Europe. It was a practical system, since
it aimed to compensate families for loss of income and other
support. It might be nice to gain revenge of a system that metes
out punishment on the basis of an eye-for-an-eye, but revenge
doesn't fill stomaches. English law was heavily dependent on
punishment, probably to deter people from upsetting a relatively
rigid social order. The church used punishment to hold people in
line (as a side note, the Church in Rome seems to have seen the
Church in Ireland as being somewhat renegade, even though the
Irish church had been following central doctrine and practice for
hundreds of years).
* English common law is open to interpretation and to rhetorical
manipulation. I have a sense that Brehon law was more
prescriptive. I would also think that dispensation of justice was
much quicker under Brehon law than under English law. A lawyer
wouldn't make a great deal of money under Brehon law. England was
drowning in legal minds during the fifteenth century.

Having said all this, I know that the following article has a distinct
pro-Irish bias. I'm not suggesting that one law system is better than
another; rather, I'm trying to discover why the English felt it
imperative to destroy the Irish legal system.

Brehon law is the usual term for Irish native law, as administered
in Ireland down to almost the middle of the seventeenth century, and
in fact amongst the native Irish until the final consummation of the
English conquest. It derives its name from the Irish word Breitheamh
(genitive Breitheamhan, pronounced Brehoon or Brehon) which means a
judge.

That we have ample means for becoming acquainted with some of the
principal provisions of the Brehon code is entirely owing to the
labours of two men, O'Curry and O'Donovan, who were the first Irish
scholars since the death of the great hereditary Irish antiquarian,
Duald Mac Firbis (murdered by an English settler in 1670), to
penetrate and understand the difficult and highly technical language
of the ancient law tracts. After much laborious work in the
libraries of Trinity College Dublin, in the Royal Irish Academy, in
the British Museum, and in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, O'Curry
transcribed eight volumes full of the so-called Brehon Laws
containing 2,906 pages, and O'Donovan nine more volumes containing
2,491 pages. Nor was their labour by any means exhaustive. There are
many more valuable Brehon documents still untranscribed in the
library of Trinity College, in the British Museum, and in the
Bodleian, and possibly some fragments in the Royal Irish Academy and
other repositories. From the labours of O'Donovan and O'Curry the
Government published in the Master of the Rolls series five great
tomes and a sixth containing a glossary. But these five large
volumes do not by any means contain the whole of Irish law
literature, which, in its widest sense, that is, including such
pieces as the "Book of Rights", would probably fill at least ten
such volumes.

*CONTENTS OF THE BREHON LAW BOOKS*
The first two volumes of the Brehon Law, as published, contain the
Seanchus Mór (Shanahus More) or "Great Immemorial Custom" which
includes a preface to the text, in which we are told the occasion of
its being first put together and "purified", and the Law of
Distress, a process which always had much influence in Irish
legislation. The second volume contains the Law of Hostage Sureties,
also a very important item in ancient Irish life, the law of
fosterage, of tenure of stock, and of social connections. The third
volume contains the important document known as the "Book of Acaill"
which is chiefly taken up with the law of torts and injuries. This
book professes to be a compilation of the various dicta and
judgments of King Cormac Mac Airt who lived in the third century,
and of Cennfaeladh, a famous warrior who fought in the Battle of
Moyrath (c. 634), and afterwards became a renowned jurist, who lived
in the seventh. The fourth and fifth volumes consist of isolated law
tracts, on taking possession, on tenancy, right of water, divisions
of land, social ranks, the laws relating to poets and their verse,
the laws relating to the Church, chiefs, husbandmen, pledges,
renewals of covenants, etc.

Although all these tracts go commonly under the generic name of the
Brehon Laws, they are not really codes of law at all, or at least
not essentially so. They are rather the digests or compilations of
generations of learned lawyers. The text of the Seanchus Mór, for
instance, which is contained in the first two volumes, is
comparatively brief. That part of it relating to the law of
immediate seizure must, according to M. d'Arbois de Jubainville,
have been written before the year 600, but not before the
introduction of Christianity into Ireland, which probably took place
in the third century. The rest of the Seanchus is not so old. The
year 438 is that given by the Irish annalists themselves for the
redaction of the Seanchus Mór which according to its own commentary
was the joint effort of three kings, of two clerics, of Ross a
doctor of the Bérla Féine or legal dialect, of Dubhthach a doctor of
literature, of Fergus a doctor of poetry, and of St. Patrick
himself, who struck out of it all that "clashed with the law of
God". It is impossible to say how far certain parts of the law may
have reached back into antiquity and become stereotyped by usage
before they became stereotyped in writing. The text of the Seanchus
Mór itself is not extensive. It is the great amount of commentaries
written by generations of lawyers upon the text, and then the
additional annotations written upon these commentaries by other
lawyers, which swells the whole to such a size.

*IRISH SOCIAL ORGANIZATION*
We are able to gather fairly well from these books the remains only
of what must once have been an immense law literature, the social
organization of a pure Aryan people, closely cognate with the
ancestors of the modern Gauls, Spaniards, and Britons; and from what
we learn of the ancestors of the present Irish people we may deduce
a good deal that is probably no less applicable to the other Aryan
Celts.

Broadly speaking, the country was governed by a ruling class called
"Kings", of different grades, the highest being the King of Ireland,
and next to these were the nobles or princes called in Irish Flaith
(pronounced like flah or floih). In all there were, including kings
and flaiths, nominally at least, seven different kinds of aires
(arras), or nobles, and provision was carefully made that a wealthy
farmer, or peasant grown rich through cattle, could, if he possessed
twice the wealth of the lowest of the seven, and had held it for
certain generations, become an aire, or noble, of the seventh, or
lowest degree. Thus wealth and descent were carefully balanced over
against each other. "He is an inferior chief whose father is not a
chief", says the law. But it took care at the same time not to close
to anyone the avenues to chieftainship. Under ancient Irish law the
land did not belong to the king or the chief or the landlord, but to
the tribe, and the lowest of the free-tribesmen had as much an
inalienable right to his share as had the chief himself. In process
of time parts of the tribal territory appear to have become
alienated to subtribes or families, and the chief, who always
exercised certain administrative duties with respect to the land,
appears to have had certain specific portions of the tribal land
allotted to himself for his own use, and for the maintenance of his
household and relatives. He was in no sense, however, what is now
known as a landlord, although the whole tendency of later times was
to increase his power at the expense of his tribe and vassals.

*FREE-TRIBESMEN*
The great bulk of the ancient Irish cultivators were the Féine
(Faina) or free-tribesmen from whom the Brehon law is called in
Irish Féineachas, or the" Law of the Free-tribesmen". In process of
time many of these in hours of distress naturally found themselves
involved in something like pecuniary transactions with their
head-chiefs, and, owing to poverty, or for some other reason, were
driven to borrow or accept cattle from them, either for milk or
tillage. These tribesmen then became the chieftain's céiles (kailas)
or vassals. They were known as Saer-stock and Daer-stock Céiles. The
Saer-stock tenant --- saer means free in the Irish language ---
accepted only a limited amount of stock; and retained his tribal
rights, always most carefully guarded by the Brehon law, in their
integrity. But the Daer-stock --- daer means unfree --- tenant, who
took stock from his chief, became liable for heavier but still
carefully defined duties. For instance for every three heifers
deposited with him by his chief, he became liable to pay his chief
the "proportionate stock of a calf of the value of a sack with its
accompaniments", and refections for three persons in the summer, and
work for three days. The tribesman, it will be observed, by
accepting stock from his chief parted to some extent with his
freedom, but his interests were carefully looked after by law, and
it was provided that after food-rent and service had been rendered
for seven years, if the chief should die, the tenant should become
entitled to the stock deposited with him. If, on the other hand, the
tenant died, his heirs were partly relieved from their obligation.
It will be observed that while this to some extent resembles the
well-known Metayer system, so common on the continent of Europe,
where the landlord supplies the stock and the land, and the tenant
the labour and the skill, it differs from it in this, namely that in
Ireland the saer- and daer-stock farmer did not supply the land,
which was theirs by right of their free tribesmanship. In this way,
namely, by accepting stock from their overlords, a rent-paying class
grew up in Ireland, to which undoubtedly in time a large proportion
of the ancient Irish came to belong, but the rent was paid not for
the land but for the chief's property deposited with the tenant.

But outside of the Free-tribesman (the Féine and Céile) there grew
up gradually a class of tenants who were not free, who in fact must
have been in something very like a state of servitude. These were
known by the name of fuidirs or bothachs, i.e. cottiers. They appear
to have been principally composed of broken men, outcasts from
foreign tribes, fugitives from justice, and the like, who, driven
out of or forsaking their own tribes, sought refuge under some other
chief. These men must have been natural objects of suspicion if not
of detestation to the free tribesmen, and, being themselves
absolutely helpless, and having no tribal rights of their own, they
became entirely dependent upon their chief, who settled them down
upon the outlying or waste lands of the tribe, or possibly at times
upon his own separate land which as chief he held in severalty, and
imposed upon them far heavier tolls or rents than the law permitted
to be exacted from any other members of the tribe. As Ireland became
more troubled by Northmen, Normans, and English, this class of
tenant increased in numbers, so many tribes were broken or
destroyed, and the survivors dispersed to find refuge in other
tribes and under other chiefs. In this way there grew up gradually,
even under Irish law, a body of tenants to whom their chiefs must
have stood in the light of something like English landlords.

*THE IRISH FAMILY OR FINE*
A curious Irish social unit was the fine (finna), consisting of one
group of five persons and three groups of four, all males. The head
of the family, called the ceann-fine (Kan-finna), and four members
made up the first group, called geil-fine, the other three groups of
four each were called deirbh-fine (true family), iar-fine (after
family), and inn-fine (end family). On the birth of a new male
member in the geil-fine the eldest member of the group was moved up
into the next four (the deirbh-fine), and one out of that four into
the next four, and one out of the last four was moved out of the
fine altogether, into the clan, or sept, this last male thereby
ceasing to be a member of the family, or fine. The sept, to use the
English term, sprang from the family, or the family after some
generations grew into the sept and then into the clan, contracting a
greater share of artificiality in proportion to its enlargement.
Because, while all the members of the sept could actually point to a
common descent, the descent from a single ancestor in the case of
the whole tribe was more or less founded upon fiction. The portion
of territory ruled over by a sub-king was called tuath (too-a) and
contained within it, at all events in later times, members of
different descents. The chief, both of the tuath and the sept, was
elected by the tribe or clansmen. The law of primogeniture did not
obtain in Ireland, and the selection was made of the man who being
of the chieftain's near blood could best defend the tribe and lead
it in both war and peace. "The head of every tribe", says the Brehon
Law tract the Cain Aigillne, "should be the man of the tribe who is
the most experienced, the most notable, the most wealthy, the most
learned, the most truly popular, the most powerful to oppose, the
most steadfast to sue for profits and to be sued for losses." As
early as the third century, in a well-known piece of Irish
literature, Cairbre, afterwards King of Ireland, is depicted as
asking his father Cormac Mac Airt the question: "For what
qualifications is a king elected over countries and tribes of
people?" And Cormac in his answer embodied the views of practically
every clan in Ireland down to the beginning of the seventeenth
century. "He is chosen", said the king, "from the goodness of his
shape and family, from his experience and wisdom, from his prudence
and magnanimity, from his eloquence and bravery in battle, and from
the number of his friends." He was, however, always chosen from the
near kindred of the reigning chieftain.

*IRISH CRIMINAL LAW*
There seems to have been no hard and fast line drawn between civil
and criminal offences in the Brehon law. They were both sued for in
the same way before a Brehon, who heard the case argued, and either
acquitted or else found guilty and assessed the fine. In the case of
a crime committed by an individual all the sept were liable. If the
offence were one against the person, and the criminal happened to
die, then the liability of the sept was wiped out, for, according to
the maxim, "the crime dies with the criminal ". If, however, the
offence had been one causing damage to property or causing material
loss, then the sept remained still liable for it, even after the
death of the criminal. This regulation resulted in every member of
the sept having a direct interest in suppressing crime.

There was always a fine inflicted for manslaughter, even
unpremeditated, which was called an eric. If the manslaughter was
premeditated, or what we would call murder, the eric was doubled,
and it was distributed to the relatives of the slain in the
proportion to which they were entitled to inherit his property. If
the eric were not paid, then the injured person or family had a
right to put the criminal to death. This acceptance of a blood-fine
or eric for murder was a great source of scandal to the English,
but, as Keating points out in the preface to his history of Ireland
written in Irish, it was really a beneficent and logical
institution, made necessary by the number of tribes into which
Ireland was divided. Nor was the punishment, though short of the
capital one, by any means light, and it at least insured
compensation to the murdered man's relatives, a compensation
amounting to the entire "honour-price" of the murderer. For every
man, from king to fuidir (the lowest class of tenant), had what was
in Irish law termed his eineachlan, or honour-price, and this was
forfeited in part or in whole, according to well-defined rules for
various crimes. It was always forfeited for taking human life.
Clergy we find more heavily punished than laymen. A man of high rank
was always fined more than one of low rank for the same
misdemeanour. An assault on a person of rank was more severely
punished than one on an ordinary man. Fines for crimes against the
person were particularly heavy; two cows, for instance, was the fine
for a blow which raised a lump but did not draw the blood. The
punishments awarded by the Brehons were of a most humane character.
There is no trace of torture or of ordeal in ancient Irish law.

>From the earliest times in which the English invaders made the
acquaintance of the Brehon law system they denounced it with the
most unsparing invective. But all the Norman chiefs who ruled over
Irish tribal lands governed their territories by it in preference to
English law, and in Elizabeth's reign the great Shane O'Neill
pointed out with bitter irony that if his Irish laws were so
barbarous as the queen's ministers alleged, it was passing strange
that three hundred families had migrated from the English pale and
the beneficent operations of English law to take refuge in his
dominions. As early as 1367 an English Statute of Kilkenny denounced
Brehon laws "wicked and damnable". "Lewd" and "unreasonable" are the
epithets applied to it by Sir John Davies. "In many things repugning
quite both to God's law and man's" is how the poet Edmund Spenser
characterized it.

The student, however, who views these laws dispassionately today,
and merely from a juridical point of view, will find in them, to use
the words of the great English jurist Sir Henry Maine, "a very
remarkable body of archaic law unusually pure from its origin". It
is, in fact, a body of law that reflects for us early Aryan custom
in its purity, almost perfectly untainted or uninfluenced by that
Roman law which overran so much of the rest of Europe. It is true
that Brehon law does bear certain resemblances to Roman law, but
they are of the slightest, and not even so strong as its resemblance
to the Hindoo codes. It has in truth certain relations to all known
bodies of Aryan law from the Tiber to the Ganges, some to the Roman
laws of earliest times, some to the Scandinavian, some to the
Slavonic, and some particularly strong ones to the Hindoo laws, and
quite enough to old Germanic law of all kinds "to render valueless",
to use the words of Sir Henry Maine, "the comparison which the
English observers so constantly institute with the laws of England".
"Much of it", says Maine, "is (now) worthless save for historical
purposes, but on some points it really does come close to the most
advanced legal doctrines of our day". "There is a singularly close
approach", he remarks in another place, "to modern doctrines on the
subject of contributory negligence, and I have found it possible to
extract from the quaint texts of the 'Book of Acaill' some extremely
sensible rulings on the difficult subject of the measure of damages,
for which it would he in vain to study the writings of Lord Coke
though these last are relatively of much later date". But he points
out how heavily the Brehon Law pays in other respects for this
striking anticipation of the modern legal spirit by its too frequent
air of fancifulness and unreality and indulgence of imagination. In
the "Book of Acaill", for instance, which, as mentioned before, is
chiefly concerned with the law of torts, we find four long pages
concerned solely with the injuries received from dogs in dogfights
--- Ireland was famous for its hounds, and dog-fights figure more
than once in old Irish literature --- setting forth in the most
elaborate way all the qualifications of the governing rule required
in the case of owners, in the case of spectators, in the case of the
"impartial interposer", in the case of the "half-interposer", that
is the man who tries to separate the dogs with a bias in favour of
one of them, in the case of an accidental onlooker, in the case of a
youth under age, and in the case of an idiot. The Brehons, in fact,
appear to have never hesitated about inventing or imagining facts
upon which to base their theoretical judgments. They endeavour to
deal with all cases and all varieties of circumstances, and they
have special rules for almost every relation of life and every
detail of the social economy. A great number of the cases which come
under discussion in the law books appear to be rather problematical
than real, cases propounded by a teacher to his pupils to be argued
on according to general principles, rather than actual subject for
legal discussion.

*ORIGIN AND GRADUAL GROWTH*
Ancient Irish law was not produced by a process resembling
legislation, but grew up gradually round the dicta and judgments of
the most famous Brehons. These Brehons may very well have been in
old times the Irish equivalents of the Gaulish Druids. There were
only four periods in the entire history of Ireland when special laws
were said to have been enacted by legislative authority: first
during the reign of that Cormac Mac Airt already mentioned, in the
third century; second, when St. Patrick came; third, by Cormac mac
Culinan, the King-Bishop of Cashel, who died in 908; and lastly by
Brian Boru, about a century later. But the great mass of the Brehon
code appears to have been traditional or to have grown with the slow
growth of custom. The very first paragraph of the Law of Distress
takes us back to a case which happened in the reign of Conn of the
Hundred Battles in the second century, and this passage was already
so antique at the close of the ninth century that it required a
gloss, for Cormac mac Culinan (who died in 908) alludes in his
glossary to the gloss upon this passage. There are many allusions in
this glossary to the Seanchus Mór, always referring to the glossed
text, which must consequently have been in existence before the year
900. The text of the Seanchus Mor relies upon the judgments of
famous Brehons such as Sencha in the first century, but there is no
allusion in its text to any books or treatises. The gloss, however,
is full of such allusions. Fourteen different books of civil law are
alluded to in it. Cormac in his glossary alludes to five. Only one
of the five alluded to by Cormac is among the fourteen mentioned in
the Seanchus Mor. This shows that the number of books upon law must
in old times have been legion. They perished, with so much of the
rest of Irish literature, under the horrors of the English invasion
and the penal laws, when an Irish manuscripts was a source of danger
to the possessor.

The essential idea of modern law is entirely absent from the
Brehons, if by law is meant a command, given by some one possessing
authority, to do or to forbear doing a certain thing under pains and
penalties. There is no sanction laid down in the Brehon laws against
those who violated them, nor did the State provide any such
sanction. This was the great inherent weakness of Irish
jurisprudence, that it lacked the controlling hand of a strong
central government to enforce its decisions. It is a weakness
inseparable from a tribal organization in which the idea of the
State, which had begun to emerge under the early Irish kings, had
been repressed. When a Brehon had heard a case and delivered his
judgment, there was no machinery of law set in motion to force the
litigant to accept it. The only executive authority in ancient
Ireland which lay behind the decision of the judge was the
traditional obedience and good sense of the people, and it does not
appear that this was ever found wanting. The Brehons never appear to
have had any trouble in getting their decisions accepted by the
common people. The public appear to have seen to it that the
Brehon's decision was always carried out. This was indeed the very
essence of democratic government, with no executive authority behind
it but the will of the people. There can be no doubt whatever that
the system trained an intelligent and law-abiding public. Even Sir
John Davies, the Elizabethan jurist, confesses "there is no nation
or people under the Sunne that doth love equall and indifferent
justice better than the Irish; or will rest better satisfied with
the execution thereof although it be against themselves, so that
they may have the protection and benefit of the law when upon just
cause they do desire it".

*INFLUENCE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH UPON BREHON LAW*
With regard to the influence of the Catholic Church upon Irish law
as administered by the Brehons it is difficult to say much that is
positive. Its influence was probably greatest in a negative
direction. We have seen that the Brehons claimed the sanction of St.
Patrick for the laws contained in the Seanchus Mór. We may also take
it for granted that it was owing to the introduction of Christianity
that Irish law began to be written down. The Gauls, as Caesar tells
us, had a superstition about committing their sacred things, which
of course included their law, to writing, and if the Irish had the
same, as is very probable, it did not survive the introduction of
the Christian religion. Then the eric-fine for homicide, although it
probably did not owe its origin to Christianity, yet supported
itself "as a middle course between forgiveness and retaliation" by
the case of one Nuada who had murdered St. Patrick's charioteer,
being put to death for his crime and Patrick obtaining heaven for
him. "At this day", says the text, "we keep between forgiveness an
retaliation, for as at present no one has the power of bestowing
heaven, as Patrick had at that day, so no one is put to death for
his intentional crimes so long as eric-fine is obtained, and
whenever eric-fine is not obtained he is put to death for his
intentional crimes, and exposed on the sea for his unintentional
crimes." Sir Henry Maine seems to think that the conception of a
Will was grafted upon the Brehon Law by the Church, but if this were
so, one would have expected that the law terms relating to it would
have been derived from Latin sources; this, however, is not so, the
terms being of purely native origin. In another most important
matter, however, the Law of Contract, the Church may have exercised
a greater influence; the sacredness of bequests and of promises
being equally important to it as the donee of pious gifts. It is
also likely that much of the law relating to the alienation of land,
all the land belonging originally to the tribe, was influenced by
the Church, and indeed the Church seems to have been the grantee
primarily contemplated in these regulations. There is a great mass
of jurisdiction relating to its territorial rights, and no doubt
this must have affected the outside body of law as well. But all
bodies of law are exceedingly unmalleable, and tend to resist the
absorption of foreign elements; and Sir Henry Maine's conclusion is
that "there has certainly been nothing like an intimate
interpenetration of ancient Irish law by Christian principle". Still
the effect of Christian principles must certainly have been great,
but they were probably powerful as a negative rather than as a
positive factor.

*EXTINGUISHED BY THE ENGLISH*
The Brehon law code was ultimately extinguished by the English in
every part of Ireland. So soon as they conquered a territory they
stamped it out, banished or slew the Brehons, and governed the land
by English law. It would have been a very inconvenient doctrine for
them that the tribe owned the land or that the people had rights as
apart from the chief. Whenever a chief made his submission he was
recognized as owner and landlord of the territory of the tribe, and
the territory was adjudged to descend by primogeniture to his eldest
son. In this way the hereditary rights of the mass of the people of
Ireland were taken from them, and they were reduced to the rank of
ordinary tenants, and, the native nobility being soon exterminated,
they mostly fell into the hands of English landlords, and were
finally subjected to those rack rents which have made the name of
Irish tenant an object of commiseration for so many generations. The
Brehon laws remained in force in every part of Ireland where the
Irish held sway until the final conquest of the country. It has been
shown that the system of land-tenure which the Fitzgeralds found
obtaining in Munster in 1170 was left unchanged by them, and the
land burdened with no additional charges until their subjugation in
1586. Duald Mac Firbis, the celebrated antiquary, who died in 1670,
mentions that even in his own day he had known Irish chieftains who
governed their clans according to "the words of Fithal and the Royal
Precepts", that is according to the books of the Brehon Law. Amongst
the many bitter injustices inflicted upon Ireland and the Irish by
the English conquest none has had more cruel or more far-reaching
effects than the abrogation of the Brehon law relating to
land-tenure and division of property.

*Publication information*
Written by Douglas Hyde. Transcribed by Dr. Michael J. Breen ---
Trinity College, Dublin.

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume II. Published 1907. New York:
Robert Appleton Company. Nihil Obstat, 1907. Remy Lafort, S.T.D.,
Censor. Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York
Bibliography

Brehon Laws (Master of the Rolls Series) 1, (1865); II (1869); III
(1873); lV (1879); V and VI (1901); D'Arbois de JUBAINVILLE, Etudes
sur le droit Celtique, avec la collobaration de Paul Collinet (2
vols. Paris, 1893); vol. I forms tome VII of M. D'Arbois' Cours de
literature Celtique; MAINE, Early History of Institutions (London,
1875); GINNELL, The Brehon Laws, a legal handbook (London, 1894);
HYDE, A Literary History of Ireland (London, 1903), xlii; Memorandum
on Land tenure, appended to Third Report of the Commission on
Congestion in Ireland, Government Blue Book (1907), 358, containing
a brief but valuable summary of the secure and comfortable position
of the masses in Ireland under the Brehon law system at the time of
the confiscation of Munster, towards the close of the sixteenth
century, and of the rack rents which followed the substitution of
English law, by MRS. STOPFORD GREEN; JOYCE, A Social History of
Ancient Ireland (Dublin, 1903); MEYER, Kultur der Gegenwart (Berlin,
1907), s.v. Keltische Literoturen.

*Essays on Brehon Law*
http://ua_tuathal.tripod.com/brehonlinks.html#Essays%20on%20Brehon
http://ua_tuathal.tripod.com/testdefault.html

*C8th Irish Legal Manuscript*
http://www.woodlandleague.org/info/info/images/BrehonLawDocument.JPG