Brehons
group · 2 works · 3 mentions · 9 anchored passages
Brehon · Brehon commentators · Brehon judges · Brehon lawyers · Brehon textwriter · the Brehon · the great Brehons
in the texts
Lectures on the Early History of Institutions
The hereditary class of professional lawyers who produced and interpreted the ancient Irish law-tracts.
They are not a legislative structure, but the creation of a class of professional lawyers, the Brehons, whose occupation became hereditary, and who on that ground have been designated, though not with strict accuracy, a caste.
When we obtain our last glimpse of the class which has received this inheritance from Chief or King—the Brehons, Judges, or Authors of Judgments—they have sunk to the lowest depth of misery and degradation through the English conquest.
The one object of the Brehons was to force disputants to refer their quarrels to a Brehon, or to some person in authority advised by a Brehon, and thus a vast deal of the law tends to run into the Law of Distress, which declares the various methods by which a man can be compelled through seizure of his property to consent to an arbitration.
Dissertations on Early Law and Custom
Class of ancient Irish jurists who declared the Brehon Law, comparable to Indian Brahmans.
That most interesting system, the ancient Irish law, is known as the Brehon Law, because it is said to have been declared by the Brehons, who are in fact as nearly as possible the Brahmans of India, with many of their characteristics altered, and indeed their whole sacerdotal authority abstracted, by the influence of Christianity.
The ancient Hindu lawyers claimed a descent from supernatural personages only second to the gods.