The court · Coibnes Uisci Thairidne, “Kinship of Conducted Water”, the 7th century

The Mill-Race

A man building a mill can bring the water to it only through his neighbour’s field. Can the neighbour refuse?

Basis. Rests on Kelly’s and Charles-Edwards’s accounts of the law-text, with one sentence of Binchy’s translation that Charles-Edwards quotes. We have not read the text itself. Open questions are set out below.

Topics: Neighbours.

The scene Our telling

Mugrón had the stream, the fall of ground and the timber for a mill. What he did not have was a way to bring the water to it. Between the stream and the place for the mill lay a long field of barley, and the barley was Echtgus’s, a farmer like himself.

Echtgus would not hear of it. A trench through his best field, he said, with water in it for ever, and his cattle falling in. Mugrón’s mother had ground her corn on a hand-quern, and Mugrón could do the same.

Mugrón offered him a turn at the mill, and then a payment, and Echtgus refused both. So Mugrón went to a judge and asked whether a man could be made to let water through his land.

What would you decide?

Answer first, then read the law. Your first answer is the one kept. It is stored only on this device.

Can Echtgus keep the mill-race off his land?

Choose an answer and open it to see what the law says of it. Then read the law below.

No. He must let the channel be dug, and he is paid a fee for it.

This matches the law as Kelly and Charles-Edwards set it out. Digging a trench through another person’s land was ordinarily against the law, but a mill-race could be an exception. Kelly says a man building a mill, with no other route for the race, could insist that his neighbour let him dig, on payment of a fee. For arable land like the barley field the fee was a sét worth ten scruples. As Charles-Edwards reads the text, the neighbour could take a turn at the mill instead.

Yes. No one may dig a trench through another man’s field.

This answer differs from the law as Kelly and Charles-Edwards set it out. That was the ordinary rule. But Kelly says a mill-builder with no other route for the race could insist on digging. On his reading the right could not be used against land of the Church, of a lord or of a king, or where a burial-mound stood. Echtgus is a farmer, and his field is barley.

No, and he is owed nothing, for a mill serves the whole district.

This answer differs from the law as Kelly and Charles-Edwards set it out. Something was owed. Kelly gives the fee as a sét worth ten scruples for arable land and half that for rough land, and as Charles-Edwards reads the text the neighbour could take a place in the rota instead. Nothing we have read lets a mill-builder dig for nothing because others would use the mill.

Read the law, the commentary and the sources

The law

The law, as Kelly and Charles-Edwards give itDigging a trench through another person’s land was ordinarily against the law. A mill-race could be an exception. Someone building a mill might have no way to bring the race to it except over a neighbour’s ground. He could then insist on being let dig, Kelly says, though he had to pay a fee.

NoteCharles-Edwards quotes Binchy’s translation of the line. Neighbours owe each other this much, it says: “to be allowed to conduct a mill-race across his land”, provided the due fee is paid. Kelly’s Guide says the builder may do it “if necessary”.

The law, as Kelly and Charles-Edwards give itThe fee was fixed. For arable land it was a sét worth ten scruples, and for rough land half that.

NoteA sét was usually worth twelve scruples, Kelly notes. Charles-Edwards says the ten-scruple sét may be a conventional rate, or the words may only mean that some article of that value was to be paid. Binchy’s translation, which he quotes, has the fee owed “for every stead to which it comes”.

The law, as Kelly and Charles-Edwards give itOn Kelly’s reading the right could not be used against land of the Church, of a lord or of a king, nor where a burial-mound stood.

NoteKelly’s literal version speaks of privileged land, nemed, a church’s or a fortress’s, and of “the precinct of a mound”. That nemed here covers whatever land the Church or a lay dignitary owned is, he says, his own belief. The editors of the bee-law, of whom he is one, read the line the same way.

The law, as Kelly and Charles-Edwards give itA neighbour who had no part in the mill, but whose land the race or anything else belonging to the mill came onto, was allowed a choice, as Charles-Edwards reads the text: he could join the rota of those who used the mill, or he could take a fee.

NoteThe editors of the bee-law put the turn at the mill first. In the mill text, they say, the race will probably begin in, or run through, other people’s land, and the answer is to let each of them grind for nothing, turn and turn about. Kelly says the text works out the milling rights by an analogy with the three circles of a kin: one for the land where the race begins, one for the land it crosses, one for the land that holds the mill-pond.

The law, as Kelly and Charles-Edwards give itA ditch full of water was a danger, and the same text deals with that too. If a person or a beast drowned in a ditch that had filled with water, the owner of the land answered for it. But seven kinds of ditch were exempt, and the ditch of a mill-race and that of a mill-pond are two of them.

NoteThe other five are the ditches of a fort, a church, a burial-mound and a turf-bog, and the ditch round a bridge. The glossator’s reason, as Kelly reports it: ditches like these are too common for anyone to sue their owners.

The commentary

Scholars sayKelly thinks no machine an early Irish farmer regularly dealt with was more complicated than the water-mill. By the seventh or eighth century, he says, mills were nothing unusual in Ireland, and both excavation and texts show it. A tidal mill at Little Island in County Cork has been dated by the tree-rings in its timbers to about 630. The Irish word for a mill, muilenn, is borrowed from Latin.

Scholars sayThe mill had protection of its own. Anyone who ground corn in another’s mill without leave paid five séts and lost the meal. Críth Gablach says so of the mill of a mruigfer, the higher grade of strong farmer, and Kelly assumes the fine was the same for anybody’s mill. Whoever destroyed a mill had to pay its owner’s honour-price and restore it.

Scholars sayThe text has a companion. Bechbretha, the law-text on bees behind three of our cases, refers to it, and Kelly thinks the two are probably by the same author. Charles-Edwards says both can be no earlier than about 635 and are probably no later than about 700. The editors of Bechbretha date that text between about 637 and 700. Charles-Edwards also points to a strain in the kinship analogy: the land where the water is drawn off is the “origin” of the mill-race and ought to come first, yet the author gives the first day of grinding to the land that holds the mill-pond.

Where we are not sure

Scholars sayWe have not read the law-text, or Binchy’s edition of it, apart from one sentence of his translation that Charles-Edwards quotes. The fee and its limits are from Kelly, who cites sections 10 and 11. The choice between a fee and a turn at the mill is from Charles-Edwards, who cites sections 10 and 12 and says a fee was owed “except in special cases”. He does not name them, and we do not know whether they are Kelly’s three. We have put the two accounts together, and the text may join them differently. Neither author notes a dispute about the right itself.

Scholars sayKelly has the ten-scruple fee for arable land. Binchy’s translation, as Charles-Edwards quotes it, has it “for every stead to which it comes”. From the books we have read we cannot tell whether that is one phrase translated twice or two parts of the rule, or whether a sét was owed for each holding the race crossed.

Scholars sayKelly says the builder could insist where there was no other route for the race. The line as Binchy translates it does not state that condition, and Kelly does not say who decided that there was no other way. Echtgus’s fear for his cattle is our own. The text makes the ditch of a mill-race exempt when something drowns in it, and Kelly notes that it also deals with injury from a badly made fence, but we have read neither passage.

Where this comes from

Fergus Kelly, Early Irish Farming (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1997), p. 436 on illegal trench-digging, the fee and its limits, citing Coibnes Uisci Thairidne §10 (CIH 460.32 to 461.9) and §11 (CIH 461.12 to 13); p. 183 on drowning in ditches (§§13 and 14); p. 396 on the seven ditches; and pp. 245 and 482 to 485 on mills.
Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1988), p. 108 on the right to cut a mill-race across a neighbour’s land; p. 197 on the analogy with the kin; and Appendix 1, no. 45.
T. M. Charles-Edwards, Early Irish and Welsh Kinship (Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 428 to 429 on the mill, the rota and the neighbour’s choice; p. 482 for Binchy’s translation of the line on the fee, which he quotes, and his own note on the sét; and p. 504 on the date of the text and its analogy.
T. M. Charles-Edwards and Fergus Kelly, Bechbretha: an Old Irish law-tract on bee-keeping (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983), p. 27 on the date of the bee-law, p. 33 on the mill text and p. 107 on the land that water may not cross.
We have read Kelly and Charles-Edwards, and the one sentence of Binchy’s translation that Charles-Edwards quotes, not the Old Irish text.

Last checked against these books: 2026-10-06. How we read our sources · Corrections