CRIMINAL LAW.  Though there are numerous laws relating to crime, to be found chiefly in the Book of Aicill, criminal law in the sense of a code of punishment there was none.  The law took cognizance of crime and wrong of every description against person, character, and property; and its function was to prevent and restrict crime, and when committed to determine, according to the facts of the case and the respective ranks of the parties, the value of the compensation or reparation that should be made.  It treated crime as a mode of incurring liability; entitled the sufferer, or, if he was murdered, his fine, to bring the matter before a brehon, who, on hearing the case, made the complicated calculations and adjustments rendered necessary by the facts proved and by the grades to which the respective parties belonged, arrived at and gave judgment for the amount of the compensation, armed with which judgment, the plaintiff could immediately distrain for that amount the property of the criminal, and, in his default, that of his fine.  The fine could escape part of its liability by arresting and giving up the convict, or by expelling him and giving substantial security against his future misdeeds.

From the number of elements that entered into the calculation of a fine, it necessarily resulted that like fines by no means followed like crimes.  Fines, like all other payments, were adjudged and paid in kind, being, in some cases of the destruction of property, generic—­a quantity of that kind of property.  Large fines were usually adjudged to be paid in three species, one-third in each, the plaintiff taking care to inform correctly the brehon of the kinds of property the defendant possessed, because he could seize only that named, and if the defendant did not possess it, the judgment was “a blind nut.”  Crime against the State or community, such as wilful disturbance of an assembly, was punished severely.  These were the only cases to which the law attached a sentence of death or other corporal punishment.  For nothing whatsoever between parties did the law recognize any duty of revenge, retaliation, or the infliction of personal punishment, but only the payment of compensation.  Personal punishment was regarded as the commission of a second crime on account of a first.  There was no duty to do this; but the right to do it was tacitly recognized if a criminal resisted or evaded payment of an adjudged compensation.  Criminal were distinguished from civil cases only by the moral element, the sufferer’s right in all cases to choose a brehon, the loss of eineachlann, partial or whole according to the magnitude of the crime, the elements used in calculating the amount of fine, and the technical terms employed. Dire (djeereh) was a general name for a fine, and there were specific names for classes of fines. Eric = reparation, redemption, was the fine for killing a human being, the amount being affected