From A Concise History of Ireland by P. W. Joyce
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36. In Ireland judges were called Brehons; and the law they administered—the ancient law of Ireland—is now commonly known as the Brehon law. To become a brehon, a person had to go through a regular, well defined course of training.
The brehons were a very influential class of men, and those attached to chiefs had free lands for their maintenance. Those not so attached lived simply on the fees of their profession. It generally required great technical skill to decide cases, the legal rules, as set forth in the law-books, were so complicated, and so many circumstances had to be taken into account. The brehon, moreover, had to be very careful, for he was himself liable to damages if he delivered a false or an unjust judgment.
37. The brehons had collections of laws in volumes or tracts, all in the Irish language, by which they regulated their judgments. Many of these have been preserved, and of late years the most important of them have been published, with translations, forming five printed volumes. Of the tracts contained in these volumes, the two largest and most important are the Senchus Mor [Shan'ahus More] and the Book of Acaill [Ack'ill]. The Senchus Mor is chiefly concerned with the Irish civil law, and the Book of Acaill with the criminal law and the law relating to personal injuries.
38. At the request of St. Patrick, Laeghaire [Leary] king of Ireland formed a committee of nine persons to revise the laws:— viz., three kings, of whom Laeghaire himself was one: three ecclesiastics, of whom Patrick was one; and three poets and antiquarians, of whom Duftach, Laeghaire's chief poet was one. These nine having expunged everything that clashed with the Christian faith, produced at the end of three years a revised code which was called Senchus Mor.
39. The very book left by St. Patrick and the others has been long lost. Successive copies were made from time to time, with commentaries and explanations appended, till the manuscripts we now possess were produced.
The language of the laws is extremely archaic and difficult, indicating a very remote antiquity, though probably not the very language of the text left by the revising committee, but a modified version of a later time. The two great Irish scholars—John O'Donovan and Eugene O'Curry—who translated them, were able to do so only after long study; and in numerous instances were, to the last, not quite sure of the meaning. Even the translation is hard enough to understand, and is often unintelligible.
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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.
This is a story for the genuine booklover, penned by an Irish bookseller under the pseudonym of Ralph St. John Featherstonehaugh.
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.
The ebook is available for download in .mobi (Kindle), .epub (iBooks, etc.) and .pdf formats. For further information on the book and author see details ».
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!
The ebook is available for download in .mobi (Kindle), .epub (iBooks, etc.) and .pdf formats. For further information on the book and author see details ».
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.
The ebook is available for download in .mobi (Kindle), .epub (iBooks, etc.) and .pdf formats. For further information on the book and author see details ».
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