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Updated: July 23, 2025
The amount of these fines was decided upon by the Brehon, who kept an extraordinary number of imaginary rulings, descending into the most minute particulars, such as what fine was to be paid in the case of one person's cat stealing milk from another person's house, what fine in the case of one woman's bees stinging another woman, a careful distinction being preserved in this case between the case in which the sting did or did not draw blood!
The Norman lords in many parts of the country lived right in the midst of an Irish population, with its Brehon judges, shanachies, harpers, and other officers, attached to their customs of gossipred, fostering, tanistry, gavelkind, and other usages, which the parliaments of Drogheda, Kilkenny, Dublin, Trim, and other places, were soon to declare lewd and barbarous.
It treated crime as a mode of incurring liability; entitled the sufferer, or, if he was murdered, his fine, to bring the matter before a brehon, who, on hearing the case, made the complicated calculations and adjustments rendered necessary by the facts proved and by the grades to which the respective parties belonged, arrived at and gave judgment for the amount of the compensation, armed with which judgment, the plaintiff could immediately distrain for that amount the property of the criminal, and, in his default, that of his fine.
Edmund Spenser, himself living in the Pale in the reign of Elizabeth, speaks as an eye-witness of "having seen their meeton their ancient accustomed hills, where they debated and settled matters according to the Brehon laws, between family and family, township and township, assembling in large numbers, and going, according to their custom, all armed."
The lands settled by the Normans around Dublin, which were called the English pale, were alone under English laws; besides five septs the O'Neills, the O'Connors, the O'Briens, the O'Lachlans, and the MacMoroghs all the rest were under the Brehon, or Irish law; and an injury, or even murder done by an Englishman on one of the Irish, was to be atoned for by a fine according to this code.
The person of Bard and Brehon was still held inviolable; to the malediction of the Bard of Usnagh was attributed the sudden death of the Deputy, Sir John Stanley; to the murder of the Brehon McEgan is traced all the misfortunes which befell the sons of Irial O'Farrell.
On the contrary, we cannot but admire the deeply moral principles elaborated within the early village communities which found their expression in Welsh triads, in legends about King Arthur, in Brehon commentaries, in old German legends and so on, or find still their expression in the sayings of the modern barbarians.
The only effective law was an undigested jumble of the Brehon, the Civil, and the Common law; with the arbitrary ordinances of the marches, known as "the Statutes of Kilcash" so called from a border stronghold near the foot of Slievenamon a species of wild justice, resembling too often that administered by Robin Hood, or Rob Roy.
"Fasting on a man" was also a mode of compelling action of another sort. St. He also fasted against a heretical city to compel it to become orthodox. He fasted against the pagan King Loeguire to "constrain him to his will." This form of hunger strike was further used under the Brehon Law as compulsion to obtain a request. For example, the Leinstermen on one occasion fasted on St.
The chief sufferers by these statutes were not the inhabitants of the wilder districts, who, for the most part, escaped out of reach of its provisions, beyond that narrow area where the Dublin judges travelled their little rounds, and who were governed still when governed at all by the Brehon laws and Brehon judges, much as in the days of Brian Boru.
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