xpeditions undoubtedly began in very early times. St. Patrick himself
was thus carried off, and the annalists tell us that in the third
century Cormac Mac Art ravaged the whole western coast of Britain, and
brought away "great stores of slaves and treasures." To how late a
period, too, the earlier conquered races of Ireland, such as the
Formorians, continued as a distinct race from their Milesian conquerors,
and whether they existed as a slave class, or, as seems more probable,
as mere outcasts and vagabonds out of the pale of humanity, liable like
the "Tory" of many centuries later, to be killed whenever caught; all
these are matters on which we have unfortunately only the vaguest hints
to guide us.

The whole texture of society must have been loose and irregular to a
degree that it is difficult for us now to conceive, without central
organization or social cement of any kind. In one respect--that of the
treatment of his women--the Irish Celt seems to have always stood in
favourable contrast to most of the other rude races which then covered
the north of Europe, but as regards the rest there was probably little
difference. Fighting was the one aim of life. Not to have washed his
spear in an adversary's gore, was a reproach which would have been felt
by a full-grown tribesman to have carried with it the deepest and most
lasting ignominy. The very women were not in early times exempt from war
service, nay, probably would have scorned to be so. They fought beside
their husbands, and slew or got slain with as reckless a courage as the
men, and it was not until the time of St. Columba, late in the sixth
century, that a law was passed ordering them to remain in their homes--a
fact which alone speaks volumes both for the vigour and the undying
pugnacity of the race.

While, on the one hand, we can hardly thus exaggerate the rudeness of
this life, we must be careful, on the other, of concluding that these
people were simple barbarians, incapable of discriminating right from
wrong. Men, even the wildest, rarely indeed live entirely without some
law to guide them, and certainly it was so in Ireland. A rule was
growing up and becoming theoretically at any rate, established, many of
the provisions of which startle us by the curious modernness of their
tone, so oddly do they contrast with what we know of the condition of
civilization or non-civilization then existing.

Although this ancient Irish law was not drawn up until long a