The Origins of Honor in Ireland

Every free person had his or her honor price, the price that one had to pay for an insult t the person's dignity. Those who had the highest degree of honor were literally sacred beings - their persons and possessions were sacrosanct. Money could be loaned; there was a highly complex system of pledges and sureties to guarantee that debtors delivered what they owed. The objects themselves were not for sale. Kings, in turn, assigned tasks to different clans,. This one was to provide them with leather. This one poets. It shields precisely the sort of unwieldy arrangement that markets were later developed to get around.