In connection with the courts we find two classes of paid advocates, one the Ebe, attorney, and the other the Aighne, or counsellor. When it is remembered that slander and libel were offences severely punished in the Brehon courts by eric fine, we can admire the grim humor which discriminated against the attorneys, who, as the wise law-givers of old [pg 516] argued, being professional libellers of other men, had no right to exact a fine when their own characters were assailed.
The custom of fosterage, about which so much unfavorable comment has been made by modern ill-informed writers, is fully and clearly explained by O'Curry, who classes it as a part of the educational system of the country, and not, as some erroneously suppose, the partial desertion of children by their parents. In Lecture XVII. he asserts:
“We have ample proof that this fosterage was not a mere indiscriminate custom among all classes of the people, nor in any case one merely confined to the bare physical nurture and rearing of the child, which in early infancy was committed to the care of a nurse and her husband; but that the fosterhood was generally that of a whole family or tribe, and that in very many cases it became a bond of friendship and alliance between two or more tribes, and even provinces. In those cases the fosterers were not of the common class, poor people glad to perform their nursing for mere pay, and whose care extended to physical rearing only. On the contrary, it is even a question, and one not easily settled, whether the term nursing, in the modern acceptation of the word, should be applied at all to the old Gaelic fosterage, and whether the term pupilage would not be more appropriate.... The old Gaelic fosterage extended to the training and education, not only of children up to the age of fourteen, but sometimes of youths up to that of seventeen years.”
One of the chief duties of the foster-father was the military training of the young chieftains. This consisted principally of the management of the horse, either in pairs for the chariot or singly for riding, the use of the casting spear and sling, and the sword exercise. Of strategy the ancient Irish soldiers had no idea, and very little of tactics; so that their battles were hand-to-hand combats, and therefore bloody and generally decisive. Their weapons of bronze or iron, many fine specimens of which we examined years ago in the museum of the Royal Irish Academy, still exhibit evidences of high finish and excellent temper. We do not find any mention of cavalry in the accounts handed down to us of the various battles fought in the earlier centuries, and very slight allusions to defensive armor. Ornaments of gold and other precious metals, such as crowns, collars, torque rings, and shield-bosses, were worn in great profusion and variety, not only by nobles and generals, but by ordinary officers; in fact, so gorgeous are the poets' descriptions of the decorations of their favorite heroes that we might be inclined to accuse them of gross exaggeration had we not also been shown some magnificent antiques of this description, in a perfect state of preservation, by the gentlemen of the academy during several visits made to that depository of Irish antiquities. Some of these valuable decorations are made of native ore, but by far the greater number were manufactured out of the spoils of war—the plunder wrested from the adjacent islands and the coast of France by the numerous expeditions that were fitted out in Ireland in the three or four centuries preceding S. Patrick's mission.
The dress of the higher classes was, it seems, equally magnificent, and each rank was distinguished, not only by the peculiar shape of its garments, but by the number of colors allowed to be worn. Thus, servants had one color; farmers, two; officers, three; women, four; chiefs, five; ollamhs and files, six; kings and queens, seven; and, according to the ancient records, bishops [pg 517] of the Christian Church were afterwards allowed to use all these combined. Red, brown, and crimson, with their shades and compounds, were the colors generally used; green, yellow, blue, and black sometimes, but not frequently. Prof. Sullivan, in that part of his introduction treating of the various dye-stuffs used in ancient Ireland, takes occasion to dissipate some popular errors with regard to national colors. He says:
“Garments dyed yellow with saffron are constantly spoken of by modern writers as characteristic of the Irish. There is no evidence, however, that saffron was at all known by the ancient Irish, and Lenas or Inars of a yellow color are only mentioned two or three times in the principal tales. From what has been shown in the Lectures and in this Introduction about the color of the ancient Irish dress, it will be evident that there was no national as distinguished from clan color for the Lena; a saffron-dyed one, if at all used in ancient times, would be peculiar to a single clan.”
The Lena here spoken of was an inner garment which hung down to the knees like a modern kilt, usually made of linen, and sometimes interwoven with threads of gold. In addition to this were worn a shirt, or Leine; a cloak (Brat); an Inar, or jacket; Triubhas, or trowsers; a Bor, or conical hat; and Cuarans, or shoes made of raw-hide. The costume of the women differed little from that of the men, except that they discarded the triubhas, and wore their lenas and leines longer. “They were, however,” says Sullivan, “distinguished from the men by wearing a veil, which covered the head. This veil was the Caille, which formed an essential part of the legal contents of a lady's work-bag. In a passage from the laws, quoted in the Lectures, it is called ‘a veil of one color’; as if variegated ones were sometimes used.... The white linen cloth still worn by nuns represents exactly both the Irish Caille and the German Hulla.” In many other respects, besides the matter of dress, women were placed on a footing nearly equal to that of men in those remote times; and if their liberal and respectful treatment may be considered one of the tests of civilization, the old Gaels were in refinement far in advance of any other race in pagan Europe, and indeed of many of our own times. We find women not only taking part in public affairs as rulers and generals, but as Druidesses, judges, poets, and teachers. At Tara and the great provincial fairs a separate portion of the grounds was assigned them, so that they could observe the games and enjoy the amusements without interruption; while in the homes of the Rigs and chiefs the best rooms, and sometimes an entire building, called Grianan, or sunny house, was exclusively reserved for their use. Most of the principal places in the country, such as the locations of the great fairs and the sites of royal palaces, were named in their honor, as well as the mountains and rivers and other objects in nature suggestive of symmetry, beauty, and elegance. We also read in the Senchus Mor several very minute and stringent laws protecting their rights of person and property, assigning their dowry before marriage and their separate ownership of property afterwards. They were, in fact, to a great extent pecuniarily independent of their husbands; and though polygamy was tolerated and divorce allowed in pagan times, they were so hedged in by restrictions and conditions that it is more than probable little advantage [pg 518] was taken of the latitude thus afforded both parties.
Being almost exclusively an agricultural people, with very little commerce with the outward world, the food of the ancient Irish was confined to the natural productions of the soil, flesh-meat, milk, and fish. Wheat, spelt-wheat, barley, and oats were produced in abundance, while cattle were so plentiful and so general an article of traffic that in the absence of coin they formed the currency of the country, and in them fines were paid and taxes levied. Butter, milk, and cheese were luxuries, but vegetables, such as leeks, onions, and water-cresses, were to be found growing in the garden of the lowest Fuidir. Beer, likewise, appears to have been the popular drink. Imported wine and native mead, distilled from honey, were considered the aristocratic beverages of the period. That large quantities of the latter were consumed at the triennial feasts there can be no doubt, judging from the tales of the poets; and it was on occasions when it was circling round the board that the Cruits (harps), Timpans, or violins, and Cruiscach, or pipes, the three principal musical instruments of the Gaels, came into play. The poets, too, were there to sing their songs of love and war, and the historians to recite the traditions of the tribes of Erinn. It is not positively known whether the pagan Irish had a written language or alphabet. O'Curry is disposed to believe they had, while Sullivan is of opinion that letters and writing were introduced with Christianity, and that previous to S. Patrick's time all teaching in the ancient schools was oral, and the genealogies and histories were committed to memory and transmitted from father to son. They both, however, agree that there was a system of writing known only to the initiated, now called Ogham, which was inscribed on prepared wood, and engraved on monuments and tombstones, many of which latter, though still well preserved, are illegible to the best antiquarian scholars. The ancient Gaels, like their descendants, had a special reverence for their dead, and indulged in protracted wakes, as well as extensive funerals. In pagan days their funeral ceremonies were most elaborate, but in Christian times these gave way to the solemn offices of the church. Each person was buried according to his rank while living; the corpse was deposited deep in the ground, and a cairn or mound of earth and stone was erected over the grave to mark the spot. We have no reason to suppose that they had even the faintest notion of a future life or of the immortality of the soul, their mythology limiting the supernatural to celebrated Tuatha da Danians, real personages, who had left the surface to inhabit the bowels of the earth, and to fairies, the “good people” of the modern peasantry.
Those, then, were the people, computed to have been about three millions in number in his time, to whom S. Patrick preached the New Law, and whose complete conversion and subsequent undying attachment to Catholicity have puzzled as well as confounded the enemies of the church. Though pagans, they were neither barbarous nor over-superstitious, and their ready appreciation and acceptance of God's mysterious and elaborate Word is the best proof that their hearts were pure and their minds active and comprehensive.