Críth Gablach

Crith Gablach is an early Irish legal tract on social hierarchy and legal status, composed in the first half of the eighth century and surviving through three incomplete sixteenth century manuscripts traceable to the MacEgan law school. Its 606 lines of prose fall into three parts covering distinctions among free commoners, differences between lords and kings, and the rights and duties of kings, and it quantifies legal consequences according to a person's social rank, since equality before the law was not a principle of early Irish law. Its citation of the 697 AD Law of Adomnan and its own citation in the later Bretha Nemed Toisech give it an unusually precise date range among early Irish legal texts. Scholarly assessments of the tract diverge sharply, with D. A. Binchy criticizing its schematism as at times ludicrous while T. M. Charles-Edwards has called it one of the few outstanding pieces of social analysis to survive from early medieval Europe. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/