WOMENa female heiress, if she wished to hold all instead of
only half of her father’s land, must undertake to pro-
vide military service at the local king’s summons, by
paying and arming a kinsman to fight on her behalf.
However, she could not pass on her estate to her chil-
dren. After her death it would revert to her father’s
kindred, unless she married her first cousin on her
father’s side or another close relative, allowing her
children to inherit the land through their father.
Legal Capacity
Apart from these exceptional heiresses, women
received only movable property—cows, household
goods, or silver—from their fathers, normally as mar-
riage goods. They were thus “second-class citizens,”
legally dependent on their fathers or brothers if they
were single, or on their husbands or grown-up sons if
they were married. These male guardians were respon-
sible for seeing that compensation was received for
injuries inflicted on their womenfolk, or that fines were
paid for crimes or damage committed by the women.
However, women were not completely without
rights. Honor price (lóg n-enech) was a graded value
applied to different classes in society, and used by
lawyers to calculate the amount of compensation a
freeman or noble could claim for insults or injuries. A
wife’s honor price was set at half the value of her
husband’s. This gave an officially married wife the
same status as an adult son still living under his father’s
roof. If the male head of the household struck a bad
bargain involving an overpayment that might result in
financial loss to his family, the wife or son could object
and dissolve the husband’s contract within a period of
ten days after the initial agreement. The husband had
an even greater right to object to his wife’s contracts,
for a period of fifteen or twenty days after she agreed
to a bargain. Secondary wives or concubines with chil-
dren had lesser rights, and concubines with no children
had even less control. However, the looser the tie
between a woman and her partner, the stronger the
connection she retained to her own kindred, and this
could provide protection against wife-beating, for
example.
Marriage
Although Old Irish treatises on customary law bear all
the signs of having been written by or for clerics,
surprisingly they recognize many more types of union
between man and woman than a monogamous Chris-
tian marriage. They were compiled between the sev-
enth and the ninth century C.E., before Carolingian
church reforms gave Continental clergy a greater role
in regulating marriage laws, and at a time when Chris-
tian Merovingian and Anglo-Saxon kings publicly kept
concubines and sometimes passed on their thrones to
the sons of those concubines. Old Irish law tracts give
pride of place to a man’s one official wife, the “first
in the household” (cétmuinter), who normally contrib-
uted movable property of her own to the joint house-
keeping and was entitled to receive it back, with any
accumulated profits, if the couple divorced later.
Divorce could be initiated by either the husband or the
wife, on a number of grounds. A wife, for example
could cite her husband’s impotence or sterility, beating
her severely enough to leave a scar, homosexuality
causing him to neglect her marriage bed, failure to
provide for her support, discussing her sexual perfor-
mance in public, spreading rumors about her, his hav-
ing tricked her into marriage by using magic arts, or
his having abandoned her for another woman. In this
last case, however, the first wife had the right to remain
in the marriage if she wished, and was then entitled to
continued maintenance from her husband.
A man could only marry another cétmuinterif his
first wife was a permanent invalid unable to fulfill her
marital duty, but it was not uncommon for husbands
to acquire one or more secondary wives or concubines,
known in the Old Irish tracts as airech, but significantly
described in the later commentaries as adaltrach(adul-
teress). Irish marital customs attracted severe criticism
from church reformers in the late eleventh century.
Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury referred to Irish-
men arbitrarily divorcing one wife in exchange for
another “by the law of marriage or rather the law of
fornication,” and Pope Gregory VII heard it rumoured
that many Irish “not only desert their lawful wives, but
even sell them.”The Later Middle Ages
Officially all this was changed after the twelfth century
church reform. Roman canon law was enforced
through the decisions of church courts in each diocese.
Following the Anglo-Norman invasion, feudalism was
introduced into Ireland, along with English common
law, which was particularly rigid in its insistence that
a landowner’s son could only inherit his father’s estate
if he was born after the canonically legitimate marriage
of his parents.
However, it soon became obvious that English com-
mon law would apply in Ireland only to the settlers of
English descent. An attempt by Irish church leaders to
bribe King Edward I to extend common law to all
native Irishmen living south of Ulster was blocked by
the Anglo-Irish barons, and the Irish continued to be
ruled by their own customary law, or “brehon law.”
Since this allowed illegitimate sons to inherit land