Customary Legal Systems - Early Irish Law, Celtic Law, Welsh Law, Early Germanic Law, Anglo-Saxon Law, Xeer, Lex Mercatoria, Pashtunwali, C Ra (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 43. Chapters: Early Irish law, Celtic law, Welsh law, Early Germanic law, Anglo-Saxon law, Xeer, Lex mercatoria, Pashtunwali, c ra, Custom, Smriti, Kris, Leges inter Brettos et Scottos, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, Medieval Scandinavian laws, Customary Aboriginal law, Urf, Adat, Aqsaqal. Excerpt: Early Irish law refers to the statutes that governed everyday life and politics in Ireland during the Gaelic period. Thought to be the oldest form of law in Northern Europe, they were partially eclipsed by the Norman invasion of 1169, but underwent a resurgence in the 13th century, and survived in parallel with English law over the majority of the island until the 17th century. "Early Irish Law" was often, although not universally, referred to within the law texts as "Fenechas," the law of the Feni, or the freemen of Irelandian Ireland mixed with Christian influence and juristic innovation. These secular laws existed in parallel, and occasionally in conflict, with Canon law throughout the early Christian period. The laws were a civil rather than a criminal code, concerned with the payment of compensation for harm done and the regulation of property, inheritance and contracts; the concept of state-administered punishment for crime was foreign to Ireland's early jurists. They show Ireland in the early medieval period to have been a hierarchical society, taking great care to define social status, and the rights and duties that went with it, according to property, and the relationships between lords and their clients and serfs. No single theory as to the origin of early Irish law is universally accepted. Early Irish law consisted of the accumulated decisions of the Brehons, or judges, guided entirely by an oral tradition. Some of these laws were recorded in text form by Christian clerics. The early theory to be recorded is contained in the Pseud...