ABSTRACT
The most remarkable feature of early Irish society was its homogeneity. From a very early date Ireland could boast of a standard vernacular language, common to all peoples in every corner of the country. Irish in fact preserves the oldest vernacular literature in western Europe, and this literature reflects a uniformity of language throughout the country which still defies adequate explanation. Ireland was never a part of the Roman Empire and never had to suffer the iron hand of Roman rule. The centralizing structure of Roman civilization, with its official language, law and city-based administrative system, never came to Ireland. Therefore, when Ireland eventually did come under the influence of Rome it was, as the Irish missionary saint Columbanus put it, the Rome of Saints Peter and Paul, not that of the Caesars.1 Although Irish people everywhere shared the same language – in the surviving literature there are no traces whatever of dialect variations, another unique feature in the context of early vernaculars – and although they probably also shared the essentials of common religious cults, the political organization of society, by contrast, presents a very fragmented picture. True, the epic literature, which purports to represent a prehistoric era, describes a country which was a unitary whole, marked off only by the boundaries of the ancient ‘Fifths’ or provinces (cóiceda < cóic, ‘five’), but the picture of society which emerges from the documentary records of the historical period is one in which the country was dotted by myriad small, tribal kingdoms, each separate and independent, and each ruled by its own king. This kind of society has been characterized as ‘tribal, rural, hierarchical and familiar’,2 with the emphasis on the local and particular aspects of social organization. By the time of our earliest documentary evidence (law texts, genealogies, and annals), the vision of Ireland as a unitary state, ruled by a high-king, had not yet emerged. Meanwhile the older socio-political entities, based on the larger provincial affinities and loyalties, had broken down, to be replaced by a patchwork of local tribal kingdoms, each confident in its own distinctiveness.3
