Brehon law

"Brehon" comes from the Old Irish breithem, judge (Early Irish law). The laws were a civil code, not a criminal one: they dealt with compensation for harm, property, inheritance and contracts, and the same article says state-run punishment for crime was foreign to the early jurists. They describe a strongly hierarchical society, careful to define each person's status and what went with it.

The oldest tracts were written down in the 7th century and compiled in the 8th. Scholars have found over 100 separate texts, some complete, some fragments, some known only by name. D. A. Binchy printed nearly all of them in his six-volume Corpus Iuris Hibernici (source).

• Senchas Már ("Great Tradition"): the largest collection, at least 47 tracts compiled in the 8th century, apparently in the north midlands, and arranged in thirds. It includes Cáin Lánamna on couples, the tracts on distraint, on clientship, on bees and watermills, and on injury and sick-maintenance (Senchas Már).
• Bretha Nemed: the "First" and "Final Judgment of Privileged Ones", from a second legal school, called poetico-legal and apparently based in Munster. They are written mostly in the obscure verse style called roscad. The first is one of the few early tracts with named authors: three brothers, a bishop, a poet and a judge (Early Irish law).
• Críth Gablach ("The branched purchase"): a tract on the status of commoners, lords and kings, dated to the first half of the 8th century (Críth Gablach).

The St Patrick story is not history. A prologue to the Senchas Már says Patrick had a committee of nine (three kings, three bishops, three learned men) revise the laws. The Annals of Ulster put the Senchas Már at AD 438. Wikipedia's article calls the story "extremely dubious": it was written centuries later, and scholars date the compilation to the 8th century. The Senchas Már article says there is no reason to think the events happened, though the story shows how the brehons saw their own law.

Brehons acted more like arbitrators than modern judges. Most cases were fought privately between the parties, with the brehon deciding. Becoming one took years of training, and the office was, or became, largely hereditary (Gaelic Ireland). Kings could judge too, and kept their own brehons for advice. How far kings had to follow professional advice is debated. Kings could not make permanent law on their own authority, only temporary emergency laws (Early Irish law).

Brehons ranked lower than you might expect. In one text the highest grade of jurist had an honour price only halfway up the scale reached by kings, bishops and the highest poets (source).

Left out: Wikipedia's Brehon article also claims a written law book of King Cormac mac Airt dated 227–266, and that brehons made "the first piece of copyright legislation" around 561. Both are legend, not record, and are not used here. Who actually wrote the tracts is disputed: "nativists" see a lay class of jurists, "anti-nativists" see clerics trained in secular law (source).

Every free person had an honour price (lóg n-enech): their status put into a fixed value, owed to them if certain offences violated their honour. It also limited what they could do in law. You could not act as a surety or witness for more than your own honour price, and people of higher rank could "over-swear" the oaths of people of lower rank (Early Irish law). Status could change: if grandfather, father and son all met a lord's property qualifications, the grandson became a lord.

For a killing, the killer normally paid two fines: a fixed body fine, the éraic or cró, and honour price to the victim's kin, varying by their status and how closely related they were. If he couldn't pay, his family paid. If they couldn't or wouldn't, the victim's family could hold out for payment, sell him into slavery, or kill him (Early Irish law, citing Kelly's Guide, pp. 125–127). The Gaelic Ireland article gives the éraic for a free person as 21 cows whatever their rank, and says execution seems to have been rare.

The law counted kin through the male line. The gelfine was the descendants of a common grandfather. The derbfine, "true kin", was the descendants of a common great-grandfather, and it is the kin group the tracts name most often (Early Irish law). A head of kin stood surety for members and made sure their debts were paid. Killing your own kin (fingal) was among the worst crimes.

The derbfine also mattered for land and lordship. Inherited land went to its members. When a chief died, the members of his derbfine chose the next one, or his successor, the tánaiste (Derbfine). Sons shared land equally, and recognised children of concubines got a share. The Normans called this gavelkind.

Children were often raised for a time by another family to strengthen family or political ties. Foster parents had to teach the child, or have the child taught. Foster parents who had done their duty could claim support from the child in old age if they were in need and had no children of their own. Fosterage ended at fifteen for girls and eighteen for boys, which Gaelic Ireland also gives as the lawful ages of marriage. Foster kin got a share of a murdered person's éraic. The Fosterage article says it was common in all classes in medieval Ireland, for boys and girls, and was governed by contract.

There was no police. The law was enforced by sureties: the naidm, who made a defaulter pay and could seize his goods, the ráth, who paid from his own property, and the aitire, who became a hostage (Early Irish law). The main remedy was distraint (athgabál): seizing a debtor's livestock. The animals were held on neutral land in case he paid, and were forfeited bit by bit as time passed. The tract on it covers four kinds of distraint with different waiting periods (Senchas Már).

A wronged person could also fast (troscad), often at the offender's door, to recover a debt or get justice, and to shame a lord who had wronged them. Letting a fasting person die on your doorstep was seen as a great dishonour. The Hunger strike article notes there is no evidence of people fasting to death in early Ireland, and some say the practice was to fast for a single night. Scholars have compared it with fasting customs in India (Early Irish law). Linking it directly to 20th-century republican hunger strikes is a modern reading, not something the law tracts show.

The popular claim: women were equal to men under Brehon law. What the sources say: it is more mixed than that.

• The laws reflect "a patriarchal and patrilineal society", and a typical woman had no honour price of her own, like children and slaves. There were exceptions, and some women held high rank. The idea that an older, more equal Celtic law was corrupted by the Church "is based mainly on conjecture" (Early Irish law).
• In general a woman had to have a male guardian. By the 8th century the preferred marriage was between social equals. In it the wife was technically dependent on her husband and had half his honour price, but had real authority over property (Gaelic Ireland).
• Donnchadh Ó Corráin calls such a wife a bé cuitchernsa, "a woman of joint dominion". Each spouse could sell or lend private property up to their honour price, "and here the wife is less free than the husband", since hers was usually half his. A lawful wife of equal birth could have her husband's foolish contracts dissolved (Ó Corráin 1985).
• Cáin Lánamna, the Law of Couples, lists ten kinds of union, from three kinds of formal marriage to unions by rape. It sets out how property was shared and how it was divided on divorce (Senchas Már).
• Divorce was allowed. Ó Corráin lists the grounds on which a man could divorce his wife, and others that ended any marriage, and says that against Late Roman and barbarian law "the Irish rules concerning divorce are not at all unusual". Married women kept property separately, and women could seek divorce as easily as men (Gaelic Ireland).
• A husband was allowed to hit his wife to "correct" her. If the blow left a mark, she was owed her bride-price and could divorce him (Early Irish law).
• Daughters with brothers did not normally inherit land. Without brothers a daughter might hold a limited share, which went back to her father's kin after her (Early Irish law).

The fair summary, from the Early Irish law article: society under the Brehon laws was male-dominated, but women had more freedom, independence and property rights than elsewhere in Europe at the time. Ó Corráin adds a warning against stressing the differences: in practice, the similarities with the rest of early medieval Europe were "much more significant".

Women brehons: the Brehon article tells of Bríg Brigaid, a woman judge of the 1st century AD named in the Senchas Már. That is a figure of legal tradition, and her date is legendary. Wikipedia says "women, like men, were Brehons" without saying how many, so the page does not.

English law came in with the Normans in the 12th century, but Brehon law didn't simply fade. A Gaelic revival brought most of the island back under it in practice. Many Norman lords adopted Irish law and custom, and outside the Pale it was the working law (Early Irish law). The Statutes of Kilkenny (1367) told the English in Ireland to use common law, not Brehon law (Statutes of Kilkenny).

The end came with the Tudor and Stuart conquest. From the 1540s, surrender and regrant had Gaelic lords hand over their lands and take them back under English law (Surrender and regrant). After the Nine Years' War (1594–1603) English law spread into Ulster, which the article says was one cause of the Flight of the Earls in 1607. Under James I, tanistry was abolished by a court decision and English land law took its place (Tanistry). Wikipedia's summary is that English common law "eventually surpassed" Brehon law in the 17th century. The professional families of lawyers depended on Gaelic lords, so they disappeared with them (Gaelic Ireland).

Spellings and meanings as each source prints them. Old Irish spelling varies between sources.

• Fergus Kelly's A Guide to Early Irish Law (DIAS, 1988), the standard handbook, is not open online and was not read. Where this page relies on it, it does so through Wikipedia's citations of it.
• The tracts say what the law should be. There is almost no case law, so how often any rule was followed is unknown (source). Críth Gablach's ranks in particular are called "schematic", and Binchy accused its author of "ludicrous schematism" (source).
• The precise court decision that ended tanistry is not named in the article used, so no date is given for it.

See also: High kings · Irish clans · Ogham