Cóic Conara Fugill
Cóic Conara Fugill (Old Irish for "Five paths to judgement"[1]: xvii ) is a short early Irish legal tract dealing with court procedure.
Manuscripts
[edit]The complete text of Cóic Conara Fugill is preserved in several manuscripts. There are five copies of it in the Corpus Iuris Hibernici alone. Rudolf Thurneysen (1925) published an edition of this text with commentary and German translation. Thurneysen (1933) later published a supplement to this, with the text of a manuscript of Cóic Conara Fugill that had subsequently come to light (in the text of Uraicecht Becc). Thurneysen distinguished two recensions of the text: RE and H.[2]: 233–234 RE is the earlier recension; its text comes from two manuscripts, R and E, of which R is the better copy.[3]: 114, 270
The title is taken from the incipit.[2]: 234
Contents
[edit]Cóic Conara Fugill is a short and difficult text, but is the only early Irish law tract to deal with how a litigant could put his case before a judge.[3]: 114 Only limited information about court procedure is available from other law tracts (for example, the short Airecht-text which tells us where people were sat in a court-room).[4]: 190 The titular five paths are procedures for pleading before a judge; each case demands a particular path and the legal advocate could be fined if he chose the wrong one. In the earlier, RE recension, these five paths are named fír ('truth'), dliged ('entitlement'), cert ('justice'), téchtae ('propriety') and coir n-athchomairc ('proper enquiry').[4]: 191–192
The fír path seems to have been unified by the presence of a legal ordeal, and was proper to perjury, estate division, and especially difficult cases; the distinction between the dliged and cert paths is not clear, but both seem to have both been proper to contractual cases; the téchtae path was proper to cases involving slaves (though whether only cases involving a slave's servile status, or more generally any case against a slave, it is not clear); the coir n-athchomairc path was perhaps a catch-all path, for those cases that did not fit into the previous four.[4]: 192 [3]: 118–125 The later, H recension places the five paths in an account of the "eight stages" of a legal case: (1) a date for the hearing is set; (2) the "path" to be taken is chosen; (3) both parties give security, to bind them to the judgement; (4) both parties plead their case; (5) both parties rebut the other's arguments; (6) judgement is made; (7) judgement is publicly declared; (8) the conclusion (a presumably formal stage, of which we know little).[4]: 191–198
Cóic Conara Fugill was composed around the 7th or 8th century.[5]: fn 1 The earliest recension of Cóic Conara Fugill is written mainly in the Fenechas style,[3]: 114 an early style of Irish legal writing characterised by archaic metre or crabbed, allusive prose. T. M. Charles Edwards suggests works in such a style originated as oral compositions.[6]: 146–147 Johan Corthals suggests some aspects of the "five paths" show borrowings from ancient rhetorical theory.[7]: 100 Thurneysen's study concluded that the system described in Cóic Conara Fugill was a "dead text" by the 10th or 11th centuries on the basis of later jurists' treatment of it.[8]: 12
D. A. Binchy suggested that the older recension of Cóic Conara Fugill (alongside the legal tracts Uraicecht Becc, Bretha Étgid, and the first and second Bretha Nemed) was the work of a hypothesised Nemed school, perhaps located in Munster.[4]: 247 Binchy suggested that there was a strong element influence on the writings of this school; this contention has come under criticism from Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Liam Breatnach and Aidan Breen.[9]: 22
References
[edit]- ^ Eska, Charlene M. (2022). Lost and Found in Early Irish Law: Aidbred, Heptad 64, and Muirbretha. Medieval Law and its Practice. Vol. 36. Leiden / Boston: Brill.
- ^ a b Breatnach, Liam (2005). A Companion to the Corpus Iuris Hibernici. Early Irish Law Series. Vol. 5. Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies.
- ^ a b c d Stacey, Robin Chapman (1994). The Road to Judgment: From Custom to Court in Medieval Ireland and Wales. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
- ^ a b c d e Kelly, Fergus (1988). A Guide to Early Irish Law. Early Irish Law Series. Vol. 3. Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies.
- ^ Archan, Christophe (2016). "The five paths to a judge: an interpretation of Cóic Conara Fugill (Five Paths to Judgement)". Clio@Themis. 10. doi:10.35562/cliothemis.1213.
- ^ Charles Edwards, T. M. (1980). "Review Article: The Corpus Iuris Hibernici". Studia Hibernica (20): 141–162. JSTOR 20496163.
- ^ Corthals, Johan (2021). "Traces of the statūs or constitutiones of ancient rhetorical theory in early Irish?". Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie. 68 (1): 99–120. doi:10.1515/zcph-2021-0006.
- ^ Thurneysen, Rudolf (1926). Cóic Conara Fugill: Die fünf Wege zum Urteil. Philosophisch-Historische Klasse. Vol. 7. Berlin: Abhandlungen der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschafte.
- ^ Kelly, Fergus (1992). "Early Irish law: The present state of research". Études Celtiques. 29: 15–23.
Further reading
[edit]- Archan, Christophe (2007). Les chemins du jugement: procédure et science du droit dans l’Irlande médiévale,. Paris: De Boccard. (edition with translation into French and discussion).
- Thurneysen, Rudolf (1926). Cóic Conara Fugill: Die fünf Wege zum Urteil. Philosophisch-Historische Klasse. Vol. 7. Berlin: Abhandlungen der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschafte. (edition with translation into German and commentary).
- Thurneysen, Rudolf (1933). "Eine neue handschrift von Cóic Conara Fugill". Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie. 19: 165–73. doi:10.1515/zcph.1933.19.1.165.