Academic literature on the topic 'Senchas Már'

Contemporary studies of the Tudor conquest of Ireland identify numerous interest-groups whose different political strategies produced a complex course of events. This paper examines the reactions of an influential segment of the Gaelic learned class, the traditional lawyers (brehons), to the threat of conquest. It offers evidence that some important brehon families supported administrative reforms within the Gaelic lordships, in accord with crown demands, and that they used native jural traditions to support legal change.As participants in the struggles of this period, the brehons have been viewed by scholars as part of the traditional cultural élite, which included poets and historians. Their indistinct appearance in the historical record partly accounts for such treatment. Brehons are scarcely mentioned in the Irish annals, while English sources tend to depict them as ultramontanists, practising ‘secret and hidden rites’, not as administrators with policies. Unlike the bardic poets, the brehons failed to leave behind a body of work that reflected their personal opinions; their literary monument, the corpus of Irish law-tracts, presents formidable barriers to interpretation, even as jural material, let alone as testimony to social history. These difficulties arise from the brehons’ deliberate attempts to preserve an appearance of antiquity and changelessness in the jural tradition. So successful were they in this, that many scholars believe that the later brehon schools copied the old law-tracts solely for their antiquarian interest and that the tracts had little relevance to contemporary affairs.

This chapter examines the Irishness of the De XII abusiuis saeculi. It does so with particular reference to Old Irish legal texts, in particular to the Archaic Old Irish text Audacht Moraind (‘The Testament of Morand’), believed by some scholars to predate even the De duodecim abusiuis (thereby placing it before c. AD 650 and earlier than every other Speculum Principis of the Middle Ages), and to the Senchas Már, the ‘Great Collection’ of early Irish laws. It discusses not just the parallels between DDAS and the legal texts, but the difficult question of which came first. There can be little doubt, however, about its original provenance in seventh-century Ireland.