"Three white cows were taken by Asal from Mogh, son of Nuada, by an immediate seizure. And they lay down a night at Lerta on the Boyne. They escaped from him and they left their calves, and their white milk flowed upon the ground. He went in pursuit of them, and seized six milch cows at the house at daybreak. Pledges were given for them afterwards by Cairpre Gnathchoir for the seizure, for the distress, for the acknowledgment, for triple acknowledgment, for acknowledgment by one chief, for double acknowledgment."
But these things are supposed to have happened in the days of Conn of the Hundred Battles, yet the case remained a leading one till the sixteenth century.
The Brehon laws probably embody a large share of primitive Aryan custom. Thus it is curious to meet the Indian practice of sitting "dharna" or fasting on a debtor in full force amongst the Irish as one of the legal forms by which a creditor should proceed to recover his debt.[4] "Notice," says the text of the Irish law,
"precedes every distress in the case of inferior grades, except it be by persons of distinction or upon persons of distinction; fasting precedes distress in their case. He who does not give a pledge to fasting is an evader of all. He who disregards all things shall not be paid by God or man. He who refuses to cede what should be accorded to fasting, the judgment upon him according to the Feini [brehon] is that he pay double the thing for which he was fasted upon, [but] he who fasts notwithstanding the offer of what should be accorded to him, forfeits his legal right to anything according to the decision of the Feini."
There were, according to Irish history, four periods at which special laws were enacted by legislative authority, first during the reign of Cormac mac Art in the third century, secondly when St. Patrick came, thirdly by Cormac mac Culinan the king-bishop of Cashel, who died in 903, and lastly by Brian Boru about a century later. But the great mass of the Brehon Code appears to have been traditionary, or to have grown with the slow growth of custom. None of the Brehon Law books so far as they have as yet been given to the public, shows any attempt to grapple with the nature of law in the abstract, or to deal with the general fundamental principles which underlie the conception of jurisprudence. A great number of the cases, too, which are raised for discussion in the law-books, appear to be rather possible than real, rather problematical cases proposed by a teacher to his students to be argued upon according to general principles, than as actual serious subjects for legal discussion. This is particularly the case with a great part of the Book of Acaill.
The part of the Brehon Law called the Seanchus Mór was redacted in the year 438, according to the Four Masters, "the age of Christ 438, the tenth year of Laeghaire, the Seanchus and Feineachus of Ireland were purified and written." Here is how the book itself treats of its own origin:
"The Seanchus of the men of Erin—what has preserved it? The joint memory of two seniors; the tradition from one ear to another; the composition of poets; the addition from the law of the letter; strength from the law of nature; for these are the three rocks by which the judgments of the world are supported."
The commentary says that the Seanchus was preserved by Ross, a doctor of the Béarla Feini or Legal dialect, by Dubhthach [Duffach], a doctor of literature, and by Fergus, a doctor of poetry.
"Whoever the poet was that connected it by a thread of poetry before Patrick, it lived until it was exhibited to Patrick. The preserving shrine is the poetry, and the Seanchus is what is preserved therein."[5]
Dubhthach exhibited to Patrick—