The Annals of Tigernach by Whitley Stokes

5 However, judging from linguistic evidence and historical references, vernacular law texts were first written down in Ireland in the seventh and the eighth centuries in Old Irish, 6 using the Roman alphabet and an orthography that is based on a form of Latin used in Britain and brought to Ireland by British missionaries around the fifth century. 4 Some institutions of early medieval Irish laws may have been in existence long before the first law-books in Ireland were even written.

Ireland had never been part of the Roman Empire, and Roman Law left little influence on the vernacular Irish law of the Early Middle Ages. It is a conscious construction, laden with the ideology of medieval European textual culture, and can be described, in the words of Neil Wright, as “the way in which early medieval writers’ medium and message could be informed by and interact with other texts which they had read, text which would, for the most part, also have been familiar to their audience.” 3 It is argued, that such intense intertextuality between all branches of the learned tradition established the authority of the law texts in the lack of direct royal legislation and enforcement, and at the same time continuously renewed the tradition in a dynamic process. The term “intertextuality” here denotes more than a collective description of the sharing, exchange and interdependence of words, figures, themes, story-plots and temporal-local settings between texts.

This article firstly provides a general account of early Irish law, and secondly examines the discourses and techniques employed in early Irish law texts and law-books that creates intertextuality with other branches of senchas. How, and why, does the study of law seamlessly merge with those of other subjects, both in the selection of texts in manuscripts and in the law texts themselves? This article aims to demonstrate the organic connection between law texts and the medieval Irish learned tradition as a whole, called senchas 2 in Old Irish. The late medieval manuscripts that record law texts are no less a kaleidoscope of learning, with texts on many other subjects copied side by side with law tracts. The law texts refer freely to history, literature, medical theories and religious texts, sometimes even bearing unique testimony to texts that are otherwise lost. From a linguistic angle, the strata of compositions in law texts traverse a millennium from the seventh to the seventeenth century, and thus afford valuable witnesses to the development of the Irish language. 1 As regulations of behaviors they cover a dazzling array of topics in such detail, that historians are able to reconstruct many aspects of medieval Irish society from them. The richness of medieval Irish law texts can be appreciated from multiple perspectives.

The Annals of Tigernach by Whitley Stokes