We do not know very much about the life of Brian Merriman (or Bryan Merryman, as he is commonly referred to in earlier sources—seemingly, the current spelling became commonplace because of the lack of a native “y” in Irish).

It is thought that he was born around 1747 in eastern Co. Clare. There is speculation that he was born on the wrong side of the blanket, the illegitimate son of a local squire. Some see in the paean to bastardry that make’s up a considerable part of the old man’s speech in the poem evidence of Brian’s feelings about his own origins. It is also suggested that this is where his anglicized name comes from. Although in some later publications, his name is gaelicized to Brian Mac Giolla Meidhre, there is no evidence that he went by anything other than Merriman in his own lifetime.

By 1770, he was in the poverty-stricken and, at the time, backward east-county village of Feakle where he served as a schoolteacher. He was also a small farmer with a holding of twenty acres. Seemingly, he was at least an adequate farmer since there is a record of his having won two prizes from the Royal Dublin Society for his flax crop.

There was no regular schoolhouse in Feakle until 1837 and the arrangements prior to that were pretty ad hoc. In 1825, for instance, there were thirteen “schools” in the parish but a description of the arrangements from a report that year of the Commissioners on Education in Ireland shows the parlousness of the system, if such it can be called.

Four of the so-called schools met in chapels and two in the kitchen of the teacher’s dwelling. Even though the latter were probably nothing to write home about, they were hopefully better than the pitiful setup for the remaining seven, which were said to meet in:

• the mistress’s dwelling—an excavation in a broad bank of earth;
• a barn—a wretched hovel;
• a wretched cabin or cattle shed;
• a temporary cabin;
• a very wretched cabin;
• a waste barn;
• a barn.

Three schools were reported to have nineteen, twenty and twenty-nine pupils, respectively, but each of the other ten had between 51 and 128 attendees (for a total of 800), astonishing numbers given the nature of the establishments. If Merriman himself is indicative of even the most able products of such schools—and where else would he have gotten his education—we can only marvel at the ability to impart, and the desire to imbibe, knowledge in such unpromising surroundings. It is clear that, however he acquired it, Merriman had an acquaintance with contemporary English and European literature and thought.

In his description of Brian’s life as an introduction to his translation of the Cúirt, Riseárd Ó Foghlú describes the hard life of the teacher:

“Bhí an saol crua go leor ar mhúinteoirí scoile i dTuamhumhain le linn Bhriain agus tamall ina dhiaidh sin: ba chaol an tuarastal do bhí ag dul dóibh ó dhaltaí bochta na háite, i dtreo go mbíodh ar an máistir bannaí, dintiúirí, srl., do scríobh do dhaoine chun cur lena fháltas, agus is minic do b’éigin don bhfear bocht ramhan agus sluasad do tharraingt chuige chun réal do thuilleamh.”
(Schoolteachers’ lives in Thomond were quite difficult in Brian’s time and for a while thereafter: they got little in remuneration from the poor children of the area and they had to supplement their income by preparing legal documents for the people, and often the poor teacher had to take shovel or spade in hand to earn the odd sixpence.)

At some stage, Brian Merriman had moved from rural Clare to Limerick City where he continued to eke out a seemingly meager existence as a teacher. He died suddenly there on July 27, 1805 as an entry in the “General Advertiser and Limerick Gazette” of Monday, 29th July, 1795 noted:

“Died.—On Saturday morning, in Old Clare-street, after a few hours’ illness, Mr. Bryan Merryman, teacher of Mathematics, etc.”

“At Limerick, after a few hours illness, Mr. Bryan Merryman, teacher of mathematics.”

Frank O’Connor, in the introduction to his translation of the poem, has similar views of the benighted city:

"There is no tablet in Clare Street to mark where Bryan Merryman, the author of the Midnight Court died, nor is there ever likely to be, for Limerick has a reputation for piety."

"Merryman was born about the middle of the eighteenth century in a part of Ireland which then must have been as barbarous as any in Europe—it isn’t exactly what one would call civilised today."

“The poem at once attained popularity. Its freedom from stilted language and archaism, its welding of the spoken speech into musical lines made it appeal to the educated and illiterate alike. Many manuscript copies were made, many people memorized it.”

“Three years ago I met a man in Kilkee…who actually repeated for me, without the slightest hitch or hesitation, more than half—and if I had not stopped him, would have given me the whole of the Midnight Court.”

“It is a fact, however strange, that none of the daring passages in the ‘Cúirt’ drew down upon their author any general outcry or denunciation. His audacious handling of ideas most sacred to the Gael, such as the celibacy of the clergy, does not appear to have made him any enemies. Probably he was protected just as Rabelais was protected by his pose of jester. … His work was probably regarded by many as a kind of naughty joke, a piece of broad ‘risky’ farce, not to be taken seriously.”

There is a great deal of evidence that the conservatism in matters religious and sexual were products of the second half of the nineteenth century which continued long into the twentieth and were, in fact, not native nor natural to the race.

Blame, or credit, for its growth has been laid at the feet of imported French Jansenism but perhaps an even more important factor was the cataclysm of the Great Famine of the 1840s. That catastrophe produced two mutually reinforcing influences pushing the people towards such conservatism: the feeling that the indescribable horror of the famine was literally God-awful, a judgment of God on the country; and the fear of bringing large numbers of children into a crowded, unsustaining environment, an aversion that encouraged delaying marriage until much later in life and fostered premarital celibacy during the prolonged period of batchelorhood/spinsterhood.

In any case, in Merriman’s own time, it seems that his poem was not merely tolerated by the people but heartily embraced. Backward the country may have been but one is dubious of the progress, if progress it was, of the following century and a half when we recall that, in 1945, the censors banned for a while Frank O'Connor's translation of the poem, just the sort of narrow-mindedness that Merriman had anticipatorily parodied long before and that was thereby deliciously, if presumably unwittingly, self-referential in its foolishness but was unfortunately made serious with the power of the nascent—and self-professedly Gaelic—state behind it!

After he finished Cúirt an Mheán Oíche, the poet fell silent and Bryan Merryman went on his way, merry or not as the case may have been.