The Brethna was not a legal tome. It did not offer centralised topics or hierarchical chapters. Legal verses were transmitted through seasonal patterns, dispute performance, and kinship retellings. You found the relevant law not by looking it up, but by knowing who could speak it in your context.

This made it deeply incompatible with colonial classification systems, which sought to catalogue, flatten, and isolate "laws" from living conditions. The Brethna's structure mirrored the seasonal and ritual cycles that governed community life—legal precedents were tied to agricultural observances, rites of passage, and seasonal ceremonies that moved through the year rather than sitting static on a page.

This pattern appears repeatedly in documented oral legal traditions. The Irish Brehon law, for instance, was organized around social status and circumstance rather than abstract categories—a king's obligations differed from a farmer's, and winter laws differed from summer laws. When English administrators attempted to codify Brehon law in the 16th and 17th centuries, they struggled precisely because its structure resisted their hierarchical indexing systems.

The Brethna was polyvocal. Different legal schools might hold different precedents for similar issues. This was not considered contradiction—it was contingency. Law was not a closed system. It was a set of interwoven inheritances.

Documented cases of this legal pluralism abound. In pre-colonial Hawaii, the kapu system maintained different codes for different islands and chiefly lineages, with local priests holding authority over regional interpretations. When missionaries and colonial officials attempted to create a single Hawaiian legal code in the 1820s and 1830s, they encountered resistance not because Hawaiians rejected law, but because they rejected the idea that law could be separated from its local context and lineage.

Similarly, among the Igbo of Nigeria, the age-grade system and village assemblies maintained overlapping legal authorities. A dispute might be resolved differently depending on whether it was heard by the elders' council, the women's council, or the age-grade association. British indirect rule attempted to flatten these into a single "customary law" for administrative purposes, inevitably losing the nuanced jurisprudence that had evolved over centuries.

Indexing requires standardisation. The Brethna resisted this by design, preserving multiple truths for multiple kin-groups under one legal tradition. This wasn't ambiguity—it was intentional pluralism that allowed the legal system to adapt across diverse geographic and cultural contexts.

Many colonial legal commentators dismissed the Brethna because it couldn't be compiled into a "reliable" legal reference. Laws seemed duplicated, contradictory, or missing. What they failed to see was that these traits protected the Brethna from extraction.

This frustration was documented across multiple colonial contexts. British anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, working in the Andaman Islands in the early 1900s, complained that local legal principles "lacked consistency" because elders would modify their explanations based on who was present and what seasonal rituals were active. What he interpreted as inconsistency was actually the law functioning as intended—responsive to circumstance rather than rigidly fixed.

In India, British administrators spent decades attempting to codify Hindu and Muslim "personal laws" for use in colonial courts. The resulting Anglo-Hindu law and Anglo-Muhammadan law were often unrecognizable to the communities they supposedly represented, precisely because the codification process stripped away the contextual flexibility that made these legal systems workable in practice. As legal scholar Bernard Cohn documented, the very act of writing down these laws transformed them into something entirely different.

By refusing to yield a clean index, the Brethna prevented wholesale incorporation into empire's legal operating system. The very flexibility that colonial administrators found chaotic was what allowed the Brethna to survive centuries of political upheaval while other legal systems collapsed under external pressure.

The Brethna's survivance lies in its refusal to be reduced. Modern protocol authors can learn from this: not all systems should be parsable. Some truths must remain relational, non-indexable, and lineage-bound.

What the Brethna preserved was not simply law, but an architecture of semantic resistance. Its refusal to be fully searchable was a form of sovereignty. When we design systems today that resist total categorisation—systems that require context, relationship, or embodied knowledge to access—we are not failing at organisation. We are choosing preservation over extraction.