ABSTRACT
The study of Gaelic Irish society has suffered in the past from an exaggerated belief in the degree of continuity in its laws and institutions, a belief which has been aided by the fact that-thanks to the survival of the early Irish law-tracts-we know more of the details of its functioning in the seventh and eighth centuries than in the fourteenth and fifteenth. Even here there is a danger of mistaking the ideals of the jurists who compiled the law-tracts for the actual condition of the society in which they lived. An extreme form of this belief in continuity has imagined Gaelic Irish society as imprisoned in a web of immutable law and custom. However, quite apart from the constant changes in local power structures caused by the proliferation of the ruling lineages, medieval Irish society experienced two periods of traumatic shock separated by one of intense political change. Following the devastating Viking slave-raids of the ninth and tenth centuries, the old polity, based on the autonomous petty kingdom (tuath) and on the increasingly powerful and equally autonomous ecclesiastical establishments, gave way to one of the regional dynasties whose kings imposed their rule on the local kinglet (rí tuaithe) and introduced new ideas of royal authority. Like their contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, they claimed paramount rights over the land and its inhabitants, including the right to transfer these rights to monasteries and, probably, individuals. Again, the later Gaelic world which came into existence after the second, and even greater, shock of the AngloNorman invasion and the partial conquest which followed it had been followed in turn by the Gaelic Revival, which involved the passing into the Gaelic cultural sphere in a greater or lesser degree of most of the lordships of Anglo-Norman origin and was very different from the earlier one. The title of king (rí) gradually passed into desuetude. In the legal sphere native Irish law absorbed elements of English law and, in its last two centuries, like that of every other European country except England, was moving towards an acceptance of the “common law” (Jus Commune) of Europe, the system composed of the Roman and Canon Laws and favored by the church. An example of this was the replacement of the earlier marriage system based on the coibhche or bride price by one that required the woman to bring a dowry to her husband. Nevertheless, by a manipulation of the Canon Law rules governing marriage, the Irish upper classes were able to continue their practice of serial marriage.
