The idea of the three orders of society and social stratification in early medieval Ireland

Abstract

The law tracts of early medieval Ireland are one of the most remarkable bodies of literature surviving from the middle ages. These tracts, written in Old Irish, date from the late seventh and eighth centuries and thus may be held to reflect something of Irish society not so very long after the introduction of Christianity. Their physical size and linguistic complexity alone have proved daunting, but once these difficulties have been surmounted the scholar is given a picture of society, albeit somewhat fragmentary in places, that suggests an astonishing degree of legal sophistication. One area in which this sophistication is most apparent is in the layers of grades of men for which the law tracts provide. If we are to believe the tracts, Ireland was an elaborately graded society. Even if we do not believe them, it is clear that those interested in law were also interested in the creation of systems of gradation around which to construct their legislation. Not surprisingly, given the importance of the subject, attempts have been made to make sense of social stratification in Ireland using the evidence provided by the law tracts. One of the more recent is by Neil McLeod. In a paper published inZeitschrift für celtische Philologiein 1986–7 McLeod analysed the various ways in which the early Irish law tracts seem to depict social ranking. There has been been much dispute both over how accurately the law tracts portray social stratification in Ireland and how accurate a picture was intended, and McLeod takes issue with the line advanced by Binchy in his 1943 Rhŷs Lecture that the numerous grades found in the laws were of little or no practical significance and, implicit in his argument, were not really intended to be.