Bearla Feini, a distinct form of Gaelic.  Several nations of the Aryan race are known to have cast into metre or rhythmical prose their laws and such other knowledge as they desired to communicate, preserve, and transmit, before writing came into use.  The Irish went further and, for greater facility in committing to memory and retaining there, put their laws into a kind of rhymed verse, of which they may have been the inventors.  By this device, aided by the isolated geographical position of Ireland, the sanctity of age, and the apprehension that any change of word or phrase might change the law itself, these archaic laws, when subsequently committed to writing, were largely preserved from the progressive changes to which all spoken languages are subject, with the result that we have today, embedded in the Gaelic text and commentaries of the Senchus Mor, the Book of Aicill, and other law works, available in English translations made under a Royal Commission appointed by Government in 1852, and published, at intervals extending over forty years, in six volumes of “Ancient Laws and Institutions of Ireland,” a mass of archaic words, phrases, law, literature, and information on the habits and manners of the people, not equalled in antiquity, quantity, or authenticity in any other Celtic source.  In English they are commonly called Brehon Laws, from the genitive case singular of Brethem = “judge”, genitive Brethemain (pronounced brehun), as Erin is an oblique case of Eire, and as Latin words are sometimes adopted in the genitive in modern languages which themselves have no case distinctions.  It is not to be inferred from this name that the laws are judge-made.  They are rather case law, in parts possibly enacted by some of the various assemblies at which the laws were promulgated or rehearsed, but for the most part simple declarations of law originating in custom and moral justice, and records of judgments based upon “the precedents and commentaries”, in the sort of cases common to agricultural communities of the time, many of the provisions being as inapplicable to modern life as modern laws would be to ancient life.  A reader is impressed by the extraordinary number and variety of cases with their still more numerous details and circumstances accumulated in the course of long ages, the manner in which the laws are inextricably interwoven with the interlocking clan system, and the absence of scientific arrangement or guiding principle except those of moral justice, clemency, and the good of the community.  This defect in arrangement is natural in writings intended, as these were, for the use of judges and professors, experts in the subjects with which they deal, but makes the task of presenting a concise statement of them difficult and uncertain.