Narratives in early Irish law: a typological study

Early Irish law texts are strewn with narratives alluding to incidents that are set in the past, usually termed ‘leading cases’ by scholars working on early Irish law. 2 These incidents are reported to have occurred across a wide range of time and space, but are almost without exception fictitious; they vary in the degree of their relevance to the law tract to which they are attached, and show a much broader horizon of learning and interest than pertains merely to legal matters. The practice of including such narratives in legal writing is alien to modern lawyers and even to other medieval European legal traditions: a study of these narratives may, accordingly, reveal to us some distinctive aspects of legal activity in medieval Ireland.