SECTION V.
From The Brehon Laws by Laurence Ginnell, 1894
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N general, no one could levy a distress but a person on whom a distress could be levied. He should have a lis and a macha (= a fold and a farmyard) in the territory. Hence none of the non-free classes could distrain, except possibly such few of them as had acquired wealth and advanced a good way up the social scale. A stranger: coming to levy a distress could not do so, under Urradhus Law, without bringing a native of the territory with him as surety, provided he could get one without fee. If he could get no native to become responsible for him without payment, and was unable or unwilling to pay, the law gave him other means of attaining his object, but not of so speedy a character. Those other means varied somewhat, the lodging of a substantial security being a common requirement. If a stranger failed to bring a surety in a case in which he was bound to bring one, or failed to lodge a security where he was allowed to do so, and attempted to distrain like a member of the clan, as by the cheap mode of fasting, not alone might he be evaded, but he was nonsuited and fined as an interloper.
Under Cain Law, however, a stranger could distrain directly without either a native surety or a security, provided he had a lis and a macha in his own native territory. And if in such a case in making his distress the stranger was evaded, the person evading him was fined; because the latter was in his own country where he had every facility for maintaining his rights, if he had rights. If instead of paying or giving a pledge, as the circumstances required, he attempted to baffle the stranger, the law stepped in for the protection of the stranger; and if in the result the stranger was able substantially to sustain his claim, it followed that the evasion of him was unjust and fraudulent, and it was punished as such.
Some modern exponents of the Brehon Laws tell us that only flaith-fines or heads of families could be sureties. Now this is another mistaken view. Not only were all the seventeen men of the fine eligible to become sureties, but they were bound in certain cases to become sureties for one another, and were liable as sureties even in cases where they had not expressly undertaken the responsibility. They were competent also to become sureties for other members of their own clan, but in this respect the flaith-fine's powers were more extensive than theirs; and he could become a surety for a person outside the clan, which they could not. Kings, chiefs, brehons, officers of court, and others filling public positions were ineligible as sureties. The non-free were, of course, wholly ineligible.
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Truelove's Journal: A Bookshop Novella
From a sad, comfortless childhood Giles Truelove developed into a reclusive and uncommunicative man whose sole passion was books. For so long they were the only meaning to his existence. But when fate eventually intervened to have the outside world intrude upon his life, he began to discover emotions that he never knew he had.
A story for the genuine booklover, penned by an Irish bookseller under the pseudonym of Ralph St. John Featherstonehaugh.
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Annals of the Famine in Ireland
Annals of the Famine in Ireland, by Asenath Nicholson, still has the power to shock and sadden even though the events described are ever-receding further into the past. When you read, for example, of the poor widowed mother who was caught trying to salvage a few potatoes from her landlord's field, and what the magistrate discovered in the pot in her cabin, you cannot help but be appalled and distressed.
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Ireland's Welcome to the Stranger
This book, the prequel to Annals of the Famine in Ireland cannot be recommended highly enough to those interested in Irish social history. The author, Mrs Asenath Nicholson, travelled from her native America to assess the condition of the poor in Ireland during the mid 1840s. Refusing the luxury of hotels and first class travel, she stayed at a variety of lodging-houses, and even in the crude cabins of the very poorest. Not to be missed!
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Henry Ford Jones' book, first published in 1915 by Princeton University, is a classic in its field. It covers the history of the Scotch-Irish from the first settlement in Ulster to the American Revolutionary period and the foundation of the country.
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