All the archaeological and literary evidence suggests that, within whatever social groups may have existed at any time and place, Celtic society was hierarchical and inegalitarian. Individuals were not equal before the law; it was, rather, a society based on variations of status and honour, and the preservation or enhancement of that honour was a vital concern. The most rigid formulation of this structure is to be found in the early Irish law tracts, where each grade of society is assigned its honour-price (Kelly 1988: 8-10). This value established the limits of the legal rights of an individual, so that no one could offer a surety beyond the level of his honour-price, and an oath was outweighed by the oath of a person with a higher honour-price. It also set the level of compensation for an offence to be paid by the offender to the victim or the victim’s kin, for the severity of a crime, and hence the extent of recompense due, was judged by the honour-price of the victim.
At a more general level, both the classical and the Irish sources agree in recognizing the existence of free and unfree classes, and of a higher rank of more exalted status. The unfree class was of little interest to the classical geographers and historians, and even the Irish laws cannot add much. There certainly were slaves who seem to have been regarded as chattels without legal rights; they were prisoners of war, those unable to pay their debts, or else, like St Patrick, people captured abroad by slave traders. Slavery was of considerable economic importance, and one system of measuring value in early Ireland used as its unit the value of a female slave. In early medieval Ireland there were also serfs, who were bound to their lords and could not renounce their tenancy.
The majority of individuals must have fallen within the free class, able to exercise their legal rights within their own community but subject to the authority of those of higher status. Roman authors such as Caesar, using Latin terminology, separate the equites (nobles), as well as some special categories such as the druids, from the ordinary people, and the Irish literature distinguishes the nemed (privileged person); as with the classical account of Celtic society, this term applies not only to the nobles, but also to those with certain special skills or knowledge.
The special groups mentioned in the classical authors include druids, bards and prophets (Piggott 1975), though it is possible that craftsmen may also have enjoyed a privileged status. Bards were particularly important, since singing the praises of a noble was a public way of honouring his status in society. By the time of the early Irish laws, the role of the pagan druids had declined, and the most important of the skilled classes was the poets, who rehearsed the traditional lore and praised the nobles for their achievements or satirized them for their failures (McCone 1990). Other groups of valued specialists included lawyers and physicians, as well as hospitallers, who owed their status to the generosity of the hospitality they offered to visitors. Others who enjoyed special status included skilled craftsmen such as carpenters and metalsmiths, as well as entertainers such as harpists.
The highest status was that of the king. Kings are attested in western Europe in the prehistoric period by the classical authors, although the institution was in decline in some parts by the early first century BC, as will be described below. Kingship was also the normal form of political authority in early medieval Ireland (Byrne 1973), and comparison with other parts of Europe suggests that there was an underlying tradition of sacral kingship common to the Indo-European world, and perhaps of considerable antiquity. The king was supposed to be wise, successful in battle and without physical blemish, and the well-being of his people was closely tied to these qualities. By the seventh and eighth centuries AD, the time when many of the legal tracts were first being written down, the nature of kingship was already being transformed into something altogether more powerful and more secular, and the spread of Christianity had eclipsed its pagan religious connotations.
The possibility of women holding positions of high status in their own right, rather than by virtue of their male relatives, seems to have varied. Some of the richest graves of the early Iron Age in central Europe were certainly the burials of women, and in the first century AD in Britain two women held power as queens over their tribes, Boudica of the Iceni and Cartimandua of the Brigantes. The picture given by early medieval Ireland, however, is very different. Neither the laws nor the Annals suggest that women were able to exercise political power, either in theory or in practice. They had no independent legal rights, but took their status from their fathers and husbands. The qualities valued in a woman were the traditional patriarchal ones of virtue, reticence and industry.
World History
