178 



"enacted, with the consent of the states of the kingdom, a body of 

 laws, the first written laws promulgated by any of the northern con- 

 querors,"* so in Ireland, as the author of Cambrensis Eversus (John 

 Lynch) mentions, a bishop, a judge, and a poet, in 686 reduced 

 into a body the scattered fragments of the laws, and called them 

 ■ Brathaneimhadh, or sacred judgments, the rights affected by which 

 he sums up in the two lines : 



" Quod sit jus cleri, satrapae, vatisque fabrique, 

 Necnon agricolae, liber iste docebit abunde." 



These were the laws which Spencer defines " to have been a rule of 

 right unwritten, but delivered by tradition from one to another, in 

 which oftentimes there appeared great shew of equity in determining 

 the right between party and party, but in many things repugnant 

 quite both to God's laws and man's;" and although they were the 

 object of statutory prohibition, they continued to be of force in some 

 of the remoter parts of Ireland, even in the reign of Elizabeth. •!■ 



It is not the province of this Essay, to enter into any discussion 

 on the subject of the Brehon code, but it may be permitted to say, 

 that while it is believed the most complete, and a very large col- 

 lection of these curious documents is now in the Library of Trinity 

 College, Dublin,:]: their publication, under judicious revision and with 

 historic illustrations, would open "a very delightful and instructive 



5; * Hume's England, vol. I . 



f Blackstone's Commentaries, vol. 1. Introduction. 



t Doctor O'Conor, in a note to the Annals of Tigemach, (Rer. Hib. Script, vol. 2.' p. 47,) 

 makes mention of a collection of the Brehon laws in the Library at Stowe. Primate Usher 

 assures us, that the Irish in his days had large volumes of their laws in their own language ; 

 and so late as the beginning of the last century, we are told that Sir Richard Cox saw 

 several of them.— See Trans. lb. Celt. Soc. p. viii. In the catalogue of the Clarendon Collec- 

 tion of MSS. we find a notice of sixteen folio sheets of the Brehon laws. 



