acted as judges, although the extent of their power compared to that of professional jurists has been debated. One law tract, , describes a giving advice to a king (in this case, advice that seems flawed but is actually correct) who then gives it as a judgment in a case. It is not clear how much kings made judgments by themselves and how much they had to follow professional advice. The kings do not appear to have stood as judges in all cases, and in some cases, the professional jurists took that role. One subject the laws did cover is how the king fit within the rest of the legal system. The king was not supposed to be above the law. Some stipulations applied specifically to the king. With a king being the most powerful individual, and the one with the highest honour in an area, it was difficult to enforce the law against him. Although it might have been possible to proceed against the king as against any other, the laws also had an innovative solution to this quandary. Instead of enforcing against the king directly, a dependent of the king known as an (substitute churl) was enforced against instead, and the king was responsible for repaying the substitute churl. The laws also specified certain cases in which a king lost his honor price. These included doing the work of a commoner, moving around without a retinue, and showing cowardice in battle; again, though, it is unclear how often such stipulations were followed. Finally, the laws commented on how the king was to arrange his life and holdings and how many individuals should be in his retinue. In particular, gives a highly schematized and unrealistic account of how the king spends his week: Sunday is for drinking ale, Monday is for judging, Tuesday is for playing , Wednesday is for watching hounds hunt, Thursday is for sexual union, Friday is for racing horses, and Saturday is for judging (a different word from Monday, but the distinction is unclear). Status According to the introduction to the , the world had numerous problems before the creation of that text. Among those problems was that everyone was in a state of equality. Unequal status was of great import to early Irish Christian society and it is recorded in many places in the early Irish laws. The Irish law texts describe a highly