Cora
Harrison's My Lady Judge, the first Burren mystery
Published by Pan Macmillan
in 2007
Cora Harrison writes:
My first book for adults, My Lady Judge, grew
from my fascination with Brehon law, the very ancient
legal system in place in most parts of Ireland, except
Dublin and the south-east, until the middle of the 16th
century (centuries later than its survival in Wales or
Scotland).
The Burren
I have always been interested in Brehon law as my
father, a lawyer himself, was a friend of Daniel Binchy
who rescued these laws from obscurity and translated them
from medieval Gaelic (into Latin!). Since then others have
written books – including one in German, but the subject
still remains almost unknown to the general public, even
in Ireland, Wales or Scotland.
However, when we came to live here in County Clare,
next to the ancient kingdom of the Burren, a very strange
hundred-square-mile territory of mountain, rock and
shattered limestone, I became even more interested as I
discovered, a few miles from our farm, the ruins of a law
school for the teaching of these laws that operated in the
15th and 16th centuries.
The remains of the Law School on the Burren
The owner of the school in mid-sixteenth century got
his scholars to copy down the laws, many of them which had
been just passed on by word-of-mouth and the resulting
document, Egerton 88, (with graffiti by the students,
complaining about their master – out making the hay while
they slaved indoors – providing them with poor ink –
making them work so hard that it seemed as if the week had
two Thursdays), is now in the British Library.
Order 'My Lady Judge' from Pan Macmillan
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Picture album of the Burren
Read The Prologue and chapter one...
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