rmers, free members of the clans, the most important
class in the ancient Irish community. Their laws were composed in
their contemporary language, the _Bearla Feini_, a distinct form of
Gaelic. Several nations of the Aryan race are known to have cast into
metre or rhythmical prose their laws and such other knowledge as they
desired to communicate, preserve, and transmit, before writing came
into use. The Irish went further and, for greater facility in
committing to memory and retaining there, put their laws into a kind
of rhymed verse, of which they may have been the inventors. By this
device, aided by the isolated geographical position of Ireland, the
sanctity of age, and the apprehension that any change of word or
phrase might change the law itself, these archaic laws, when
subsequently committed to writing, were largely preserved from the
progressive changes to which all spoken languages are subject, with
the result that we have today, embedded in the Gaelic text and
commentaries of the _Senchus Mor_, the _Book of Aicill_, and other
law works, available in English translations made under a Royal
Commission appointed by Government in 1852, and published, at
intervals extending over forty years, in six volumes of "Ancient Laws
and Institutions of Ireland," a mass of archaic words, phrases, law,
literature, and information on the habits and manners of the people,
not equalled in antiquity, quantity, or authenticity in any other
Celtic source. In English they are commonly called Brehon Laws, from
the genitive case singular of _Brethem_ = "judge", genitive
_Brethemain_ (pronounced brehun), as Erin is an oblique case of Eire,
and as Latin words are sometimes adopted in the genitive in modern
languages which themselves have no case distinctions. It is not to be
inferred from this name that the laws are judge-made. They are rather
case law, in parts possibly enacted by some of the various assemblies
at which the laws were promulgated or rehearsed, but for the most
part simple declarations of law originating in custom and moral
justice, and records of judgments based upon "the precedents and
commentaries", in the sort of cases common to agricultural
communities of the time, many of the provisions being as inapplicable
to modern life as modern laws would be to ancient life. A reader is
impressed by the extraordinary number and variety of cases with their
still more numerous details and circumstances accumulated in the
course