The English Jesuit writer Edmund Campion after a visit to Ireland wrote the History of Ireland (1571) and described the inside of a law school at the time where junior brehons were trained ‘ I have seese them where they kept school, ten in some one chamber, grovelling upon couches of straw, their bookes at their noses, themselves lying flatte prostrate, and so to chaunte out their lessons by peece-meal, being for the most part lusty fellowes of trenty-five years and upwards’.