Early Irish law, also called Brehon law (from the old Irish word breithim meaning judge), comprised the statutes which governed everyday life in Gaelic Ireland. They applied in Early Medieval Ireland and were partially eclipsed by the Norman invasion of 1169, but underwent a resurgence on most of the territory of the island from the 13th century, coexisting in parallel with English common law, which eventually surpassed them in the 17th century. Early Irish law was often mixed with Christian influence and juristic innovation. For centuries, these secular laws existed in parallel, and occasionally in conflict, with canon law and English common law, the latter of which was first introduced in Ireland in the 12th century.
The laws were a civil rather than a criminal code, concerned with the payment of compensation for harm done and the regulation of property, inheritance and contracts; the concept of state-administered punishment for crime was foreign to Ireland's early jurists. They show Ireland in the early medieval period to have been a hierarchical society, taking great care to define social status, and the rights and duties that went with it, according to property, and the relationships between lords and their clients and serfs.
