of the phrase in the Laws, we see that a connexion with the word frécre (responsum) is always at the bottom of the translation, and the sense is accordingly obscured: e. gr. Senchus Mor, ii. p. 286, dligṫur a fastad .…. muine frecurṫur cell co foltuib teċtaib, where the translation reads “it is right to make them binding unless he (the chief) is responded to with lawful returns”. In fact the gloss on the passage shows that the phrase had quite passed beyond the reach of the glossator, for he paraphrases muine freagartur é do rer incialla in breiteamuin, “unless the return is made according to the sense of the judge”. Evidently here everybody looked on the words as meaning “response according to the sense”. The second passage involves the same misconception (vol. iv. 98), ar ba heaḋ ba teċta leo frecor ceille in talmun dia torad fadesin, rendered “for they deemed it just that the land should receive (for the injury done it) an equivalent in its own produce”. But this is to introduce a subtlety foreign to the original gloss, which simply means “they deemed right the cultivation of the land for its own produce”. The use of the phrase is exemplified in the Gr. Celt.², p. 917; cf. Ml. 30 d16, 43 a2.
The divergencies of the monachic and the brehon uses of the Irish language, as representing the Christian and pagan aspects of civilization, cannot, perhaps, yet be inquired into with much prospect of success; but it can scarcely be doubted that, though the laws were subjected to the early revision of the missionaries who converted Ireland, a work in which they were coated over with a varnish of ecclesiastical tincture, the brehons kept the old institutions, on the whole, singularly free from subsequent infusions of similar tendency. The investigation of the terms adopted by the monks will perhaps afford a clue to the felt deficiencies of root-words expressive of the new ideas.
So many terms relative to books and writings are derived from Latin (cf. liter, focal, scribend, legend, aibgiter, caiptel, sillab, epistil, lebor, fers, serin, &c), that the inference seems unavoidable that nothing of the kind was known in Ireland before the introduction of Christianity. The great number of words of ecclesiastical import is of course perfectly natural under the circumstances, though it is perhaps not unworthy of notice that the word for the Evangel is translated into the vernacular, so-scéle, just as the word go-spel.
