Libertarian Ancient Ireland

excerpt from pages 286-290,

For a New Liberty by Murray Rothbard

(audio article below)

The most remarkable historical example of a society of libertarian law and courts, however, has been neglected by historians until very recently. And this was also a society where not only the courts and the law were largely libertarian, but where they operated within a purely state-less and libertarian society. This was ancient Ireland—an Ireland which persisted

in this libertarian path for roughly a thousand years until its

brutal conquest by England in the seventeenth century. And,

in contrast to many similarly functioning primitive tribes

(such as the Ibos in West Africa, and many European tribes),

preconquest Ireland was not in any sense a “primitive” society:

it was a highly complex society that was, for centuries, the

most advanced, most scholarly, and most civilized in all of

Western Europe.

For a thousand years, then, ancient Celtic Ireland had no

State or anything like it. As the leading authority on ancient

Irish law has written: “There was no legislature, no bailiffs, no

police, no public enforcement of justice. . . . There was no trace

of State-administered justice.”

How then was justice secured? The basic political unit of

ancient Ireland was the tuath. All “freemen” who owned land,

all professionals, and all craftsmen, were entitled to become

members of a tuath. Each tuath’s members formed an annual

assembly which decided all common policies, declared war or

peace on other tuatha, and elected or deposed their “kings.”

An important point is that, in contrast to primitive tribes, no

one was stuck or bound to a given tuath, either because of kinship

or of geographical location. Individual members were

free to, and often did, secede from a tuath and join a competing

tuath. Often, two or more tuatha decided to merge into a

single, more efficient unit. As Professor Peden states, “the

tuath is thus a body of persons voluntarily united for socially

beneficial purposes and the sum total of the landed properties

of its members constituted its territorial dimension.” In

short, they did not have the modern State with its claim to

sovereignty over a given (usually expanding) territorial area,

divorced from the landed property rights of its subjects; on the

contrary, tuatha were voluntary associations which only comprised

the landed properties of its voluntary members. Historically,

about 80 to 100 tuatha coexisted at any time throughout

Ireland.

But what of the elected “king”? Did he constitute a form of

State ruler? Chiefly, the king functioned as a religious high

priest, presiding over the worship rites of the tuath, which

functioned as a voluntary religious, as well as a social and

political, organization. As in pagan, pre-Christian, priesthoods,

the kingly function was hereditary, this practice carrying

over to Christian times. The king was elected by the tuath

from within a royal kin-group (the derbfine), which carried the

hereditary priestly function. Politically, however, the king had

strictly limited functions: he was the military leader of the

tuath, and he presided over the tuath assemblies. But he could

only conduct war or peace negotiations as agent of the assemblies;

and he was in no sense sovereign and had no rights of

administering justice over tuath members. He could not legislate,

and when he himself was party to a lawsuit, he had to

submit his case to an independent judicial arbiter.

Again, how, then, was law developed and justice maintained?

In the first place, the law itself was based on a body of

ancient and immemorial custom, passed down as oral and

then written tradition through a class of professional jurists

called the brehons. The brehons were in no sense public, or

governmental, officials; they were simply selected by parties

to disputes on the basis of their reputations for wisdom,

knowledge of the customary law, and the integrity of their

decisions. As Professor Peden states:

the professional jurists were consulted by parties to disputes

for advice as to what the law was in particular cases, and

these same men often acted as arbitrators between suitors.

They remained at all times private persons, not public officials;

their functioning depended upon their knowledge of

the law and the integrity of their judicial reputations.

Furthermore, the brehons had no connection whatsoever

with the individual tuatha or with their kings. They were completely

private, national in scope, and were used by disputants

throughout Ireland. Moreover, and this is a vital

point, in contrast to the system of private Roman lawyers, the

brehon was all there was; there were no other judges, no “public”

judges of any kind, in ancient Ireland.

It was the brehons who were schooled in the law, and who

added glosses and applications to the law to fit changing conditions.

Furthermore, there was no monopoly, in any sense, of

the brehon jurists; instead, several competing schools of

jurisprudence existed and competed for the custom of the

Irish people.

How were the decisions of the brehons enforced? Through

an elaborate, voluntarily developed system of “insurance,” or

sureties. Men were linked together by a variety of surety relationships

by which they guaranteed one another for the righting

of wrongs, and for the enforcement of justice and the decisions

of the brehons. In short, the brehons themselves were

not involved in the enforcement of decisions, which rested

again with private individuals linked through sureties. There

were various types of surety. For example, the surety would

guarantee with his own property the payment of a debt, and

then join the plaintiff in enforcing a debt judgment if the

debtor refused to pay. In that case, the debtor would have to

pay double damages: one to the original creditor, and another

as compensation to his surety. And this system applied to all

offences, aggressions and assaults as well as commercial contracts;

in short, it applied to all cases of what we would call

“civil” and “criminal” law. All criminals were considered to be

“debtors” who owed restitution and compensation to their

victims, who thus became their “creditors.” The victim would

gather his sureties around him and proceed to apprehend the

criminal or to proclaim his suit publicly and demand that the

defendant submit to adjudication of their dispute with the

brehons. The criminal might then send his own sureties to

negotiate a settlement or agree to submit the dispute to the

brehons. If he did not do so, he was considered an “outlaw”

by the entire community; he could no longer enforce any

claim of his own in the courts, and he was treated to the

opprobrium of the entire community.

There were occasional “wars,” to be sure, in the thousand

years of Celtic Ireland, but they were minor brawls, negligible

compared to the devastating wars that racked the rest of

Europe. As Professor Peden points out,

without the coercive apparatus of the State which can

through taxation and conscription mobilize large amounts

of arms and manpower, the Irish were unable to sustain any

large scale military force in the field for any length of time.

Irish wars . . . were pitiful brawls and cattle raids by European

standards.

Thus, we have indicated that it is perfectly possible, in theory

and historically, to have efficient and courteous police,

competent and learned judges, and a body of systematic and

socially accepted law—and none of these things being furnished

by a coercive government. Government—claiming a

compulsory monopoly of protection over a geographical area,

and extracting its revenues by force—can be separated from

the entire field of protection. Government is no more necessary

for providing vital protection service than it is necessary

for providing anything else. And we have not stressed a crucial

fact about government: that its compulsory monopoly

over the weapons of coercion has led it, over the centuries, to

infinitely more butcheries and infinitely greater tyranny and

oppression than any decentralized, private agencies could

possibly have done. If we look at the black record of mass

murder, exploitation, and tyranny levied on society by governments

over the ages, we need not be loath to abandon the

Leviathan State and . . . try freedom.

Libertarian Ancient Ireland

read by Jeff Riggenbach