Here, quite as a matter of course, we find a king sitting in judgment, without even a brehon for assessor, on a civil case of no great importance, a case of damage done by straying sheep. The king judged unfairly, not indeed because it was in his wife's lawsuit, but because he made an award of excessive damages. His people deposed him and gave the kingship to the youth who proposed the fair award. And so intimately was the judicial office combined with the kingly office in the medieval Irish mind, that the capacity of judging rightly was thought to be hereditary in the royal blood: "A true judgment, he who pronounced it is in truth the son of a king!" From this same work, cited by Mr. Orpen, I could quote example after example of the same fact, quite well known to Mr. Orpen, but "in the heat of hatching, the hen does not know an egg from a stone." I could also cite a bookful of instances from the annals, the historical poems, the ancient stories, and other sources, showing that the ancient and medieval Irish were quite as familiar as were the magistrates of the Helvetian State with criminal jurisdiction and with penalties in every degree, including the death penalty, as the sanction of their laws. The normal court of law in ancient Ireland was the king's court, as the normal court in a Gaulish republic was the court of the magistrates of the republic. The druids' tribunal in Gaul and the brehons', also originally the druids' tribunal, in Ireland, was a subsidiary institution. It did not carry with it the plenary powers of the regular tribunal, and therefore relied in part on the reverence of the people for justice--with regard to which we have the most remarkable testimony borne by Englishmen in Ireland at the time when Irish law was on the verge of total abolition. And one of these writers aptly says that nothing that the Irishman does, however praiseworthy, finds favour with a set of men who are his professional traducers. The brehons were primarily jurists, and in their hands Irish law was elaborated and refined, its development in this respect being similar to the development of Roman law. They acted also as legal advisers to litigants, safeguarding the proper legal form of their proceedings. They acted also as assessors and advisers to the kings in court. When they sat as judges by themselves, their courts were at least theoretically tribunals of arbitration, but differed from the casual arbitrations of our time in having more of the character of institutions. It is probably true that after the Feudal invasion, and especially when Irish law was adopted by Feudal lords, the brehon's court tended to supersede the court of king or lord as the normal instrument of judicature.