BREMEN
756
BREMEN
is no nation or people under the Sunne that doth
love equall and indifferent justice better than the
Irish; or will rest better satisfied u-ith the execution
thereof although it be against themselves, so that
they may have the protection and benefit of the law
when upon just cause they do desire it".
Influence of the Catholic Church upon Bre- HON Law. — With regard to the influence of the Catho- lic Church upon Irish law as administered by the Brehons it is difficult to say much that is positive. Its influence was probably greatest in a negative dirtction. We have seen that the Brehons claimed the sanction of St. Patrick for the laws contained in the Seanchus Mdr. V\'e may also take it for granted that it was owing to the introduction of Christianity that Irish law began to be written down. The Gauls, as Ca?sar tells us, had a superstition about committing their sacred things, which of course included their law, to wTiting, and if the Irish had the same, as is very probable, it did not survive the introduction of the Christian religion. Then the eric-fine for hom- icide, although it probably did not owe its origin to Christianity, yet supported itself "as a middle course between forgiveness and retaliation" by the case of one Nuada who had murdered St. Patrick's chari- oteer, being put to death for his crime and Patrick obtaining heaven for him. "At this day", says the text, "we keep between forgiveness and retaliation, for as at present no one has the power of bestowing heaven, as Patrick had at that day, so no one is put to death for his intentional crimes so long as eric-fine is obtained, and whenever eric-fine is not obtained he is put to death for his intentional crimes, and ex- posed on the sea for his unintentional crimes." Sir Henry Maine seems to think that the conception of a Will was grafted upon the Brehon Law by the Church, but if this were so, one would have expected that the law terms relating to it would have been derived from Latin sources; this, however, is not so, the terms being of purely native origin. In another most important matter, however, the Law of Contract, the Church may have exercised a greater influence; the sacred- ness of bequests and of promises being equally im- portant to it as the donee of pious gifts. It is also likely that much of the law relating to the alienation of land, all the land belonging originally to the tribe, was influenced by the Church, and indeed the Church seems to have been the grantee primarily contem- plated in these regulations. There is a great mass of jurisdiction relating to its territorial rights, and no doubt this must have affected the outside body of law as well. But all bodies of law are exceedingly unmalleable, and tend to resist the absorption of foreign elements; and Sir Henry Maine's conclusion is that "there has certainly been nothing like an intimate interpenetration of ancient Irish law by Christian principle". Still the effect of Christian principles must certainly have been great, but they were probably powerful as a negative rather than as a positive factor.
Extinguished by the English. — The Brehon law- code was ultimately extinguished by the English in every part of Ireland. So soon as they conquered a territory they stamped it out, banished or slew the Brehons, and governed the land by English law. It would have been a very inconvenient doctrine for them that the tribe owned the land or that the people had rights as apart from the chief. Whenever a chief made his submission he was recognized as owner and landlord of the territory of the tribe, and the territory was adjudged to descend by primogeniture to his eldest son. In this way the hereditary rights of the mass of the people of Ireland were taken from them, and they were redviced to the rank of ordinary ten- ants, and, the native nobility being soon exterminated, they mostly fell into the hands of English landlords, and were finally subjected to those rack rents which
have made the name of Irish tenant an object of
commiseration for so many generations. The Brehon
laws remained in force in every part of Ireland where
the Irish held sway until the final conquest of the
country. It has been shown that the system of land-
tenure which the Fitzgeralds found obtaining in Mun-
ster in 1170 was left unchanged by them, and the
land burdened with no additional charges until their
subjugation in 1586. Duald Mac Firbis, the cele-
brated antiquary, who died in 1670, mentions that
even in his own day he had known Irish chieftains
who governed their clans according to "the words
of Fithal and the Royal Precepts", that is according
to the books of the Brehon Law. Amongst the many
bitter injustices inflicted upon Ireland and the Irish
by the English conquest none has had more cruel or
more far-reaching effects than the abrogation of the
Brehon law relating to land-tenure and division of
property.
Brehon Laws (Master of the Rolls Series) I, (1S65); II (1S69); III (1873); IV (1S79); V and VI (1901); D'.\rbois DE JuB.\iNviLLE. Etudes sur le droit Celtique, avec la coUaboration de Paul Collinet (2 vols. Paris, 1893); vol. I forms tome VII of M. d'Arbois' Cours de litterature cehiqiie; Hmse, Early History of Institutions (London. 1875); Gtxnell, The Brehon Laws, a lifjal handbook (London, 1894); Hyde, A Literary History of Ireland (London, 1903), xlii: Memorandum on Land tenure, ap- pended to Third Report of the Commission em Congestion in Ire- land, Government Blue Book (1907), 358. containing a brief but valuable summary of the secure and comfortable position of the masses in Ireland imder the Brehon law system at the time of the confiscation of Munster, towards the close of the sixteenth century, and of the rack rents which followed the substitution of English law, by Mrs. Stopford Green; Joyce, .4 Social History of Ancient Ireland (Dublin, 1603); Meyer, Kultur der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1907), s. v. Keltische Literaluren.
Douglas Hyde.
Bremen, formerly the seat of an archdiocese situated in the north-western part of the present German Empire. After Charlemame's conquest of the Sa.xons, Christianity was preached in the region about the lower Elbe and the lower Weser by St. Willehad; in 787 Willehad was consecrated bishop, and that part of Saxony and Friesland about the mouth of the Weser assigned him for his diocese. He chose as his see the city of Bremen, which is mentioned for the first time in documents of 782, and built tiiere a cathedral, praised for its beauty by St. Anschar; it was dedicated in 789. The Diocese of Bremen, however, was erected only under St. \^'ille- had's successor, St. Willerich (804 or 805-838). After the death of the third bishop, Leuderich (d. 845), by an act of a sj-nod of Mainz (848), Bremen was united with the Archdiocese of Hamburg, which, since its foundation, in 831, had been under St. Anschar, who was appointed first archbishop of the new arch- diocese (848-865). Hamburg had been destroyed by the Vikings in 845, and in 1072, after a second de- struction of the city, the archiepiscopal see was definitely transferred to Bremen, though the title w-as not formally transferred imtil 1223. Until the secularization of 1803 Hamburg had its own cathe- dral chapter. Before it was united -n-ith Hamburg, the Diocese of Bremen had belonged to the Province of Cologne. Despite the protests of the Archbishop of Cologne against the separation of Bremen, Pope Nicholas I, in 864, confirmed the new foimdation, which fell heir to the task of evangelizing the pagan North.
Rembert (865-888), the successor of St. Anschar, summoned the Benedictines from Corvei and became a member of the order; his companion and suc- cessor, St. Adalgar (888-909), was likewise a Bene- dictine. Both performed great services in the con- version of the North to Christianity. When the Archbishop of Cologne renewed his claims to Bremen, Pope Formosus, in 892, gave the decision that the Archbishop of Bremen was to be independent of the Metropolitan of Cologne, but should take part in the diocesan synods of Cologne. Under St. Hoger (909- 916), a Benedictine of Corvei, and Reginward (917-
