Cain Adomnain: the first laws for women
Women’s access to power through status and profession among tribal societies was circumscribed by custom and ideology and by physical and legal oppression. But there is substantial evidence that women’s rights, before the rediscovery of classical patriarchal literature≈ in the medieval West after the twelfth century, were protected by law.
The ways in which male lawmakers developed their ideas about women is revealing of both their prejudices and the difficulties they encountered in trying to characterise the value and meaning of women’s lives in a culture ostensibly driven by war, masculinity and kinship rivalry over land rights.A ninth-century Irish story tells how Adamnan (died 704), a celebrated abbot of Iona and author of the Life of St Columba, incurred the displeasure of his mother, Ronnat. He had thought himself a good and dutiful son until she told him that her desire was:
‘…that you should free women for me from encounter, from camping, from fighting, from hosting [raiding], from wounding, from slaying, from the bondage of the cauldron’.3
Ronnat took her son to see the aftermath of a bloody battle, a field of slaughter strewn with the bodies of female combatants cut down in the fighting. Here they came upon a woman whose head had been severed, but whose baby still lay upon her breast. Adamnan replaced the woman’s head on her body and made the sign of the cross with his staff over her breast, whereupon she rose up∂ and said to Adamnan:
‘Well now… to thee henceforward it is given to free the women of the Western world. Neither drink nor food shall go into thy mouth until women have been freed by thee.’4
In case the saintly abbot did not get the message, his mother had him chained up and deprived of food for eight months (a symbolic endurance of privation, so that, perhaps, he should know what mothers suffer during pregnancy); but women were still not free.
Then she buried him in a stone chest until worms devoured his tongue; and then she again deprived him of food for eight months. After four years, the tortured Adamnan was released from his sarcophagus and taken to the Plain of Birr.‘Arise now out of thy hiding place’, said an angel to Adamnan. ‘I will not arise, [he replied] until women are freed for me.’5
This myth of the creation of women’s rights in ancient Ireland has a solid basis in fact. At the Synod of Birr in County Offaly in the year 697, according to the Annals of Ulster, Adamnan promulgated the Lex Innocentium or Law of Innocents, which conferred non-combatant status on clerics, males under fighting age – and all women. Reading between the somewhat fanciful lines of the Cain Adomnain – an amalgam of all sorts of accounts of the synod composed at least a hundred years after the fact – it is evident that Adamnan’s law provoked considerable opposition among many of the kings present. In response, the saintly abbot cursed them and their offspring: they, in turn, agreed to pass his law. The list of witnesses to the final decree is impressive and convincing: more than thirty abbots and bishops and no fewer than fifty kings, whose contemporaneity and authenticity is guaranteed by the various genealogies and notices in the Irish annals in which they appear.
From the date of the synod onwards, fines, penances and punishments were to be meted out to any who broke the law; and these are no mere tokens of clerical disapprobation:
For whoever slays a woman shall be condemned to a twofold punishment, that is, his right hand and his left foot shall be cut off… and his kindred shall pay seven full cumals [literally a female slave: a cumal had the value of three milch cows].6π
Women were to be protected, not just against wanton murder and involvement in men’s wars: fines were to be imposed on men who placed a hand on a woman’s girdle or who put a hand under her dress or caused a blemish on any part of her body, let alone those who might force intercourse on her. Even the imputation of lewd behaviour or the denial of paternity were to be punished.
Adamnan’s argument in favour of this radical departure from Irish tribal custom, in which women were valued by lawyers and the clergy largely for their reproductive energies, was to appeal to a universal: all men had mothers, to whom they owed a duty of protection:Thou shalt establish a law in Ireland and Britain for the sake of the mother of each one, because a mother has borne each one, and for the sake of Mary mother of Jesus Christ, through whom all are.7
In a brilliant and insightful analysis of the experience of women in Early Irish society, The Land of Women, Lisa Bitel argues persuasively that the Lex Innocentium, and the moral status of motherhood promulgated in the Cain Adomnain, are both explicable in the broad context of Early Medieval tribal society, set against the extensive literature that survives from Ireland to tell us about the often troublesome relations between men and women.
Men in Early Medieval Ireland (and by that one means specifically literate men, almost exclusively professional lawyers and theoretically celibate churchmen) thought of women in relation to what they knew themselves to be: that is to say, whatever men were like, women were not. For the most part, women were mysterious, having some of the characteristics of animals, children, the mentally defective and the inescapably sinful. Even so, they were desirable, useful, complex, occasionally holy and gifted. They were to be evaluated for their propensity to fidelity, to bear children and to give wise counsel. In myths they were complicit in elopement and seduction, if also sometimes victims of evil men. Whatever frustrations and ambiguities they posed for men, no one thought that the world could do without them. Lisa Bitel writes:
The debate over woman’s nature helped confine real women to traditional social roles, exclude them from formal politics, and deprive them of property, all on account of their theoretical inferiority. Nonetheless, as the very existence of the debate suggests, men believed that women still, somehow, astonishingly, exercised a fearful influence over them.
Despite the literati’s repressive laws and misogynist invective, men continued to consort, collaborate, and negotiate with all kinds of women. And this led them to a genuinely pressing dilemma: how could a man decide which woman to marry, which to do business with, which to pray to, which to avoid altogether, if he could not guess her type and nature? Men needed to know. To protect themselves, men had to predict the behaviour and understand the character of women. Yet, as the literati themselves sometimes acknowledged, their desperate efforts were doomed from the start. Woman remained, to the literati at least, unknowable.8As the Life of St Brigit∆ reveals, society was under extreme stress in Early Medieval Ireland, threatened by warfare, famine and disease. To sustain order and to ensure the survival of each generation, rules for the inheritance of property and the resolution of disputes were minutely negotiated. Reproduction and child-rearing were essential to maintain social relations among kinfolk and to provide labour that owed service and loyalty to the family and their lords. Adamnan, with his unique authority as scholar, holy man and successor to St Columba, found himself in a position to elevate the legal position of women as mothers and, as mothers to all, to raise them above the subordinate status that the lawyers and clerics had previously granted them. How women’s lives changed materially after the Synod of Birr is by no means so clear; but as a unique expression of an attempt to redress their invidious position in a patriarchal society, the Cain Adomnain is a unique and valuable milestone.