Lectures on the Early History of Institutions | Page 6

not know that, in any extant
body of legal rules, the difficulty of mastering the contents has ever
been so seriously aggravated by the repulsiveness of the form. One of
the editors has unkindly, but not unjustly, compared a Brehon tract to
the worst kind of English law-book, without even the moderate
advantage of an alphabetical arrangement.
The exact date at which the existing manuscripts were written cannot
be satisfactorily settled until they are all made accessible, which
unfortunately they are not at present. But we know one MS. of the
Senchus Mor to be at least as old as the fourteenth century, since a
touching note has been written on it by a member of the family to
which it belonged: "One thousand three hundred two and forty years
from the birth of Christ till this night; and this is the second year since
the coming of the plague into Ireland. I have written this in the 20th
year of my age. I am Hugh, son of Conor McEgan, and whoever reads
it let him offer a prayer of mercy for my son! This is Christmas night,
and on this night I place myself under the protection of the King of
Heaven and Earth, beseeching that he will bring me and my friends safe
through the plague. Hugh wrote this in his own father's book in the year
the great plague."
The system of legal rules contained in these law tracts is undoubtedly
the same with that repeatedly condemned by Anglo-Irish legislation,
and repeatedly noticed by English observers of Ireland down to the
early part of the seventeenth century. It is the same law which, in 1367,

a statute of Kilkenny denounces as 'wicked and damnable'. It is the
same law which Edmund Spencer, in his 'View of the State of Ireland,'
describes as 'a rule of right unwritten, but delivered by tradition from
one to another, win which oftentimes there appeareth a great show of
equity, in determining the right between party and party, but in many
things repugning quite both to God's law and man's'. It is the same
'lewd' and 'unreasonable' custom which Sir John Davis contrasts with
the 'just and honourable law of England,' and to which he attributes
such desolation and barbarism in Ireland, 'as the like as never seen in
any country that professed the name of Christ.' It is not our business in
this department of study to enquire how far this violent antipathy was
politically justifiable. Even if the worst that has been said by
Englishmen of the Brehon law down to our own day were true, we
might console ourselves by turning our eyes to spheres of enquiry fuller
of immediate promise to the world than ours, and observing how much
of the wealth of modern thought has been obtained from the dross
which earlier generations had rejected. Meanwhile, happily, it is a
distinct property of the Comparative Method of investigation to abate
national prejudices. I myself believe that the government of India by
the English has been rendered appreciably easier by the discoveries
which have brought home to the educated of both races the common
Aryan parentage of Englishman and Hindoo. Similarly, I am not afraid
to anticipate that there will some day be more hesitation in repeating
the invectives of Spenser and Davis, which it is once clearly understood
that the 'lewd' institutions of the Irish were virtually the same
institutions as those out of which the 'just and honourable law' of
England grew. Why these institutions followed in their development
such different paths it is the province of History to decide; but, when it
gives an impartial decision, I doubt much its wholly attributing the
difference to native faults of Irish character. We, who are able here to
examine coolly the ancient Irish law in an authentic form, can see that
it is a very remarkable body of archaic law, unusually pure from its
origin. It has some analogies with the Roman law of the earliest times,
some with Scandinavian law, some with the law of the Sclavonic races,
so far as it is known, some (and these particularly strong) with the
Hindoo law, and quite enough with old Germanic law of all kinds, to
render valueless, for scientific purposes, the comparison which the

English observers so constantly institute with the laws of England. It is
manifestly the same system in origin and principle with that which has
descended to us as the Laws of Wales, but these last have somehow
undergone the important modifications which arise from the
establishment of a comparatively strong central authority. Nor does the
Brehon law altogether disappoint the expectations of the patriotic
Irishmen who, partly trusting to the testimony of Edmund Spenser, the
least unkind of the English critics of Ireland, though one