Customary Laws

Ancient Irish law wasn't produced by a process resembling today's legislation, rather it grew around the dicta and judgments of the most famous Brehons. There are only four periods in the entire history of Ireland when special laws are said to have been enacted by anything resembling such legislative authority: first during the reign of Cormac Mac Airt in the 3rd 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 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 by the close of the ninth century that it required a gloss, for Cormac Mac Culinan alludes in his glossary to the gloss upon this passage. There are many allusions in this glossary in the Seanchus Mor, always referring to the glossed text which must consequently have been in existence before the year 900. The text of the 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 gloss. This shows that the number of books upon law must have been legion in old times. They perished, unfortunately, with so much of the rest of Irish literature, under the horrors of the English invasion and the penal laws when an Irish manuscript was the source of great danger to the possessor of such.

Ancient Ireland under the Brehon laws functioned as a society that knew the law and obeyed the law resorting to a Brehon only as a last resort unlike our modern litigious society. The universal remedy for a wrong done was payment of compensation. That payment was based on honor price of the victim, their kin and the nature and seriousness of the wrong. Broken down to its basic form, its really simple.

The law of the Celts grew from a complex set of customs and practices handed down for millenia. They seem complicated to us at first because we are looking at them from an 20th century mindset which has known nothing other than a Roman based legal system.

The Brehon Laws and the Laws of Hywell Dda stem from a time before the concept of the "Irish" or "Welsh", instead they derived from a complex set of customs and practices that were handed down from generation to generation of what then were the Celtic tribes.

The Brehon Laws were written down first, from the 5th - 8th centuries, whereas the Law of Hywell Dda was first written down much later and already shows outside influences which must be stripped away to find the Celtic root of the laws. An example of such influence is found in a series of laws regarding the rights and duties of members of a royal court, starting with the heir apparent, the Edling. The legal term, "Edling", is derived from the Anglo Saxon "aetheling" in contrast to the original Welsh "gwrthrychiad".

Of course even the Brehon Laws were not without their outside influences, in their case that of the Church. For example, the Cain Lanamna text gives detailed descriptions for divorce proceedings with no mention of condemnation. However, the author of Heptad 51 quotes Mark 10.9, "what no God has joined, let no man put asunder'.