Passed on orally, from at least the first century BC the Brehon Laws, named for Ireland's wandering jurists, were first set down on parchment in the seventh century AD, using the newly-developed, written Irish language, and continued in use until the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Although the Irish had been living by the laws since before the time of Julius Caesar, by the time of Elizabeth I the Brehons, along with the Irish poets, were considered a danger to the realm, and the old laws 'lewd', 'unreasonable', and 'barbarous'. And so the Brehons, the poets and the ancient laws were banned and English common law substituted. It was the end of the Gaelic order.

Some of the Brehons buried their precious manuscripts, or hid them behind loose stones in the hearth. Other manuscripts became torn or damp, and were burned or allowed to rot. Fortunately, a good number of manuscripts fell into the hands of collectors, and are now safe in the libraries of Trinity College and the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, at the British Museum, Oxford University and on the continent of Europe.

In 1852 the Brehon Law Commission employed two native Irish scholars, Eugene O'Curry and John O'Donovan to unravel the mysteries of the laws. For years they pored over the manuscripts. Sitting in dimly-lit libraries, surrounded by pens and ink-pots, every day they peered through magnifying glasses at the handwriting of the old scribes, struggling to decipher the tiny glosses that ran between the lines and up the margins. For clarity they first copied the laws onto fresh sheets of paper. Then they translated them into English.

What gradually came to light as, in the words of D. A. Binchy, 'the crabbed and obscure texts... yielded up their secrets', was not simply a collection of dry and dusty prohibitions, but thousands of details - details that describe ancient life in the days when the Irish still lived in mud huts and small ringed settlements, and paid their bills in cows and bacon, handsome gold brooches and ordinary wooden bowls: the brewer testing a grain of malt against his tooth to guard against bitterness in the ale; farmers lugging sides of beef to the chieftain, to pay their quarterly rent; a pregnant who craves a morsel of food; mischievous boys shouting at pigs.

Myles Dillon has called the Irish law-tracts 'probably the most important documents of their kind in the whole tradition of western Europe'. The value lies not only in their great antiquity, or in the pictures of everyday life unavailable from other sources. It may lie primarily in the fact that the Irish Celts, unlike those of France and Britain, were never conquered by Rome. Ireland had grown up in what some like to call 'splendid isolation' across the Irish Sea.

So the Irish laws serve as a repository of primitive customs, some dating back 3,000 years and most gathered by Celtic wanderers from various members of the far-flung Indo-European family.

Certain Irish laws, for example, mirror the Germanic tribal custom of demanding payment of a fine, generally in livestock, for deliberate assault or homicide. Others outline preparations for the great assemblies held regularly at Tara and other pagan burial sites long before the arrival of Patrick - gatherings that correspond to the assemblies and funeral games held at the Roman Forum. Scholars could conceivably compare the strong position of women in the Irish laws with that of women in Greece at that the time of Homer.

Perhaps the Hindu procedure of sitting dharna most dramatically reveals the ancient Indo-European connections: a creditor, particularly one of a lower class that the recalcitrant debtor, was entitled to sit in front of the debtor's house daily and fast, to embarrass the debtor into paying up.

Other laws, such as the Irish 'blush-fine' for unjustly satirizing a fellwo tribesman, demonstrate the dread of losing face, a fear shared with the ancient Irish by such widely scattered societies as the Japanese, and the Ashanti tribespeople of Ghana. Moreover, the Brehon Laws often remind Jews of the Talmud, and other scholars of pre-Islamic traditions.

Although scholars have called the old Irish laws 'gravely defective' in that they were not based on principles or never produced a central organization, Eoin MacNeill wrote in 1934 that even Ireland's enemies in the time of Elizabeth and James I commented on the love of the Irish for justice, and for their laws. I, for one, can see why.

From the Appletree Press title: Traditional Irish Laws by Mary Dowling-Daley