Patrilineal inheritance

Shortly after our first research group meeting and dinner, I was on my way up North. I arrived late in Helsinki, and spent the next day working in the library of Musiikkitalo, in a quiet modern atmosphere. In the afternoon, I went to Akateeminen Kirjakauppa, designed by the renowned Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. I could spend hours here, browsing the impressive book selection and art supplies. Another great location is the central library called Oodi. I like to go there to read international newspapers, but it isn’t as quiet as other places, and I go there for downtime and background intimacy not work.

I worked on inheritance laws in the early Irish law texts. The canonical texts were written down in 7th and 8th centuries AD, but the surviving manuscripts containing law texts only start from 12th century onwards. They are usually heavily glossed, and the layers of transmission are cumulative. Some glossators were writing at a time far removed from the context of the original contents. They also had access to sources from other legal systems, first and foremost Roman-Canon law. Their legal interpretations could refer to the canonical text and lived reality of say 700 AD, as part of their training in law schools, but they may apply a framework to this interpretation that wouldn’t have been available at that time. Likewise, they might have had access to sources (eg. letters that circulated widely in the medieval West) containing legal themes they would recognise as parallels but apply a distinct interpretation to them, not necessarily the same as the originally intended one (by the foreign scribe). How socio-legal rules are conceptualised in each layer of the text impacts their informative value.

Our main source on inheritance law Bretha for Macshlechtaib ‘Judgements on Categories of Sons’ is largely lost, surviving only in a few glossed quotations. A thorough analysis of the respective manuscripts is vital in order not to muddle the layers and end up with a picture that never existed at any given time. We can draw on other texts, for instance those dealing with marriage, property, and divorce, to fill in some of those gaps, but the limitations remain. What we can say is that we also see payments being exchanged upon marriage, but the definition of marriage was less clear than in the continental parallels. Marriage between two partners of equal wealth and status (with mutual exchanges) was the most desirable option and associated with those of high socio-legal status, but variations existed. One plausible type of marriage was the one where the husband brought significantly more wealth into the marriage, implying that the wife wasn’t given a dowry by her family. This could easily happen when the woman was of lower status than her husband (known as hypergamy). The opposite was also known, but would have been less common, since it required a wealthy propertied woman marrying an unlanded man. Such a woman might have been a banchomarba (heiress), but the translation is misleading. Women did not inherit family land. However, in the absence of male heirs, they could ‘inherit’ a life-interest in the land. The most important difference is that her sons would not inherit the land, but it reverted back to her male kindred following her death. There were ways around this, by marrying a male descendant, e.g. a paternal cousin, that would have stood to inherit, and Biblical justifications were provided for would have otherwise counted as incest. It would appear that all children resulting from any of these three types of marriages were regarded as legitimate, and all sons of a spouse, also known as ‘sons of completeness’ stood to inherit family land from their father, divided equally among them. While many other unions are mentioned due to their procreative potential, far less is known about the status of the children resulting from them. We shall explore, in as far as we can, the lives of slave women and the wives of semi-free tenants in a history from the bottom up in the future.