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Updated: May 3, 2025
The highest in rank, the ollamh, knew 350 kinds of verse and could recite 250 principal and 100 secondary stories. The ollamhs lived at the court of the kings and the nobles, who granted them freehold lands; their persons and their property were sacred; and they had established in Ireland schools in which the people might learn history, poetry, and law.
But let us repeat it it must have the wish. By JOHN O'DEA, National Historian, A.O.H.. In the social organization of no nation of antiquity were societies of greater influence than in pagan Ireland. During many centuries these societies, composed of the bards, ollamhs, brehons, druids, and knights, contended for precedence.
The shanachies were also bound to prove for themselves the moral qualifications of the ollamhs.1 Many of these details and the following are chiefly derived from Prof. A shanachy of any degree, who did not preserve these "purities," lost half his income and dignity, according to law, and was subject to heavy penalties besides.
Nevertheless, the bardic schools still existed in the seventeenth century, more than four hundred years after the landing of Strongbow, and, in them, students followed the lectures of the ollamhs for six months each year, or until the coming of spring, exercising both their talents for composition and their memory.
Genealogies and traditions ruled the whole, and gave, as we have seen, to their learned men a most important part and function in the social state; and thus what the Greek and Latin authors, Julius Caesar principally, have told us of the Celtic Druids, is literally true of the ollamhs in their various degrees.
There is no doubt the other agglomerations of Celtic tribes, the Gauls chiefly, enjoyed institutions very similar, if not perfectly alike. The highest generic name for a learned man or doctor was "ollamh." These ollamhs formed a kind of order in the race, and the privileges bestowed on them were most extensive.
We have already seen that so sacred were the limits of the clan districts, that one of the chief duties of ollamhs and shanachies was to know them and see them preserved. But if territory was defined in Celtic nations, the right of holding land differed in the case of the chieftain and the clansman.
After a long trial of this policy of treachery and craft, came Cromwell to complete the work with violence and brutal force. There still remained in the island a great number of noble families, and the ollamhs and genealogists kept clear the rolls of the respective pedigrees.
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