Early Irish law

Early Irish law, also called Brehon law (from the old Irish word breithim meaning judge), comprised the statutes which governed everyday life in Gaelic Ireland. They applied in Early Medieval Ireland and were partially eclipsed by the Norman invasion of 1169, but underwent a resurgence on most of the territory of the island from the 13th century, coexisting in parallel with English common law, which eventually surpassed them in the 17th century. Early Irish law was often mixed with Christian influence and juristic innovation. For centuries, these secular laws existed in parallel, and occasionally in conflict, with canon law and English common law, the latter of which was first introduced in Ireland in the 12th century.

The laws were a civil rather than a criminal code, concerned with the payment of compensation for harm done and the regulation of property, inheritance and contracts; the concept of state-administered punishment for crime was foreign to Ireland's early jurists. They show Ireland in the early medieval period to have been a hierarchical society, taking great care to define social status, and the rights and duties that went with it, according to property, and the relationships between lords and their clients and serfs.

The secular legal texts of Ireland were edited by D. A. Binchy in his six-volume Corpus Iuris Hibernici. The oldest surviving law tracts were first written down in the seventh century and compiled in the eighth century.

Early Irish law consisted of the accumulated decisions of the Brehons, or judges, guided entirely by an oral tradition. Some of these laws were recorded in writing by Christian clerics. The earliest theory to be recorded is contained in the Prologue to the Senchas Már. According to that text, after a difficult case involving St. Patrick, the Saint supervised the mixing of native Irish law and the law of the church. A representative of every group came and recited the laws related to that group, and they were written down and collected into the Senchas Már, excepting that any law that conflicted with church law was replaced. The story also tells how the law transitioned from the keeping of the poets, whose speech was "dark" and incomprehensible, to the keeping of each group who had an interest in it. The story is extremely dubious as not only is it written many centuries after the events it depicts, but it also incorrectly dates the collection of the Senchas Már to the time of St. Patrick while scholars have been able to determine that it was collected during the 8th century, at least three centuries after the time of St. Patrick. Some of the ideas in the tale may be correct, and it has been suggested by modern historians that the Irish jurists were an offshoot from the poetic class that had preserved the laws. According to the Annals of Ulster, the Senchas Már was written in AD 438.

For some time, especially through the work of D. A. Binchy, the laws were held to be conservative and useful primarily for reconstructing the laws and customs of the Proto-Indo-Europeans just as linguists had reconstructed the Proto-Indo-European language. For instance, historians have seen similarities between Irish and Indian customs of fasting as a method of shaming a wrongdoer to recover a debt, or to demand the righting of a wrong. Other legal institutions prominent in early Irish law but foreign to most contemporary legal systems, such as the use of sureties, have been considered as survivals from earlier periods. More recently historians have come to doubt such attributions. While few historians argue that all Irish law comes from church influence, they are today much more wary as to what material is a survival and what has changed. A past may still be suggested for a certain legal concept based on Irish legal terms' being cognate with terms in other Celtic languages, although that information does not prove that the practice described by the legal term has not changed.

Today, the legal system is assumed to contain some earlier law influenced by the church, and adaptation through methods of reasoning the Irish jurists would have sanctioned. There is a dispute as to just how large a role each of these aspects may have played in creating the legal texts. The evidence leaves important scope for debate.

In one area, scholars have found material that is clearly old. A number of legal terms have been shown to have originated in the period before the Celtic languages split up, because they are preserved both in Old Irish and in the Welsh legal texts. On the other hand, this is not regarded as unquestionable evidence that the practices described by such terms are unchanged or even have their origins in the same period as do the terms.

Another important aspect when considering the origins is that the early Irish law texts are not always consistent. Early Irish law is, like the Old Irish language, remarkably standard across an Island with no central authority; as one scholar wrote, "The edifice of the law stands above all local and regional rivalries as a unified system." Even so, close examination has revealed some variations. Among these one can especially point to variations both in style and content between two of the major legal schools, as they are known: those that produced the Bretha Nemed and Senchas Már.