enech

enech (‘face’) is the word used in Irish law from at least the 7th century, both by itself and in various combinations, for ‘honour’. An insult and the payment required to compensate for it are enechruicce (‘face‐reddening’); another term for compensation for outraged honour is enechlann (‘face‐cleaning’). In the legal tract Críth Gablach there is an elaborate play on this notion of the face: seven things cause a man's enech to fall, such as not only committing an offence, but also failing to give a pledge to guarantee compensation, and then being satirized. The threat of satire was claimed to give the poets power through ‘the law of the face’. There are likewise three things which wash the dirt of such offences from the face: the ‘pumice‐stone’ of publicly admitting a fault, the ‘water’ of payment for any damage caused, and the ‘towel’ of penance according to a penitential. A freeman's status is expressed by lóg n‐enech (‘the value of the face’). If he is killed, lóg n‐enech or díre is paid to his kinsmen, both patrilineal and matrilineal, in proportion to their status and to their proximity to the dead man. Compensation for the killing, injury, or insult if the victim is one of a freeman's dependants, for example his wife, is fixed as a proportion of the freeman's lóg n‐enech. A freeman's honour price varies from a very low value up to seven or more slave‐women for a king.

The importance of the concept of honour in early Irish law is illustrated by theft. Compensation for theft is divided into two parts: a payment to the owner of the thing stolen and a payment to the owner of the land or building from which it was stolen. The latter is fixed according to the man's lóg n‐enech, full lóg n‐enech if it is his house, and, if the thing was stolen from outside, diminishing fractions according to distance from the house. If, therefore, something is stolen from land owned by the owner of the article taken, the latter is entitled to both payments, for the thing stolen and for the place from which it was stolen. If, however, the article was deposited with someone else, the two payments will go to different people. It is also illustrated by the limits placed by Críth Gablach on a freeman's power to perform certain legal acts, such as entering into suretyship for another; he may do so only up to the value of his face.

Thomas M. Charles‐Edwards