Celtic Law - The Evolution of The Celtic Laws

The Evolution of The Celtic Laws

Law is not static; it changes constantly to suit the needs of the society which it regulates. However, this not necessarily means that the principles on which these laws are based change at the same speed. Where the Celtic laws are concerned, it seems as if the guiding legal principles remained quite similar over an extended period, from late prehistory into the Middle Ages. Of course, this does not imply complete co-identity of legal systems between the communities of late prehistoric Gaul and those of early medieval Ireland. Rather, it is a result of similar social, political and economic requirements of the societies governed by these laws, which seem to have been sufficiently similar across this rather large area in both space and time that made fundamental changes to the legal principles unnecessary.

The focus on certain elements of the law, like those dealing with kin-group relations and contracts, makes it likely that these principles evolved out of the needs of still primarily kinship-based societies. They seem to have remained reasonably useful even into times when primarily kinship-based forms of social organisation had been replaced with somewhat more territoriality-based ones, in which kinship nonetheless remained a very important structuring factor in society.

While we cannot date or place the origin of the various principles that make up Celtic laws in later prehistory (some of them probably of great antiquity even when they became part of Celtic laws, others perhaps developed as late as the Iron Age), once we find them expressed in Celtic legal terminology, we can reasonably call them 'Celtic laws'. This development of a Celtic legal terminology seems to have taken place some time in later prehistory, with the conventional date given as roughly 1000 BC, even though this may be several centuries off.

While based on generally similar principles, legal evolution took place locally or at the most regionally, to suit the requirements of any given society. Interaction between these different societies then must have resulted in useful innovations being adopted and adapted for their own respective needs by many societies, and less useful practices being abandoned as a result. It thus is quite likely that both the early medieval Irish and Welsh laws, the two that have survived for posterity in sufficient detail to be reasonable interpretable, are local developments, having originated where they are documented, but constantly subject to outside influence and internal innovation, and thus not particularly dissimilar to other laws practiced in their vicinity at the time they were recorded.