In this condition of legal ideas, which it would be absurd to call jurisprudence, the general duty of keeping faith is not recognized except as a matter of religious or social observance. Those who desire to be assured of anything that lies in promise must exact an oath, or a pledge, or personal sureties; and even then the court of their people--in England the Hundred Court in the first instance--will do nothing for them in the first case, and not much in the two latter. Probably the settlement of a blood-feud, with provisions for the payment of the fine by instalments, was the nearest approach to a continuing contract, as we now understand the term, which the experience of Germanic antiquity could furnish. It is also probable that the performance of such undertakings, as it concerned the general peace, was at an early time regarded as material to the commonweal; and that these covenants of peace, rather than the rudimentary selling and bartering of their day, first caused our Germanic ancestors to realize the importance of putting some promises at any rate under public sanction. We have not now to attempt any reconstruction of archaic judgment and justice, or the lack of either, at any period of the darkness and twilight which precede the history of the middle ages. But the history of the law, and even the present form of much law still common to almost all the English-speaking world, can be understood only when we bear in mind that our forefathers did not start from any general conception of the state's duty to enforce private agreements, but, on the contrary, the state's powers and functions in this regard were extended gradually, unsystematically, and by shifts and devices of ingenious suitors and counsel, aided by judges, rather than by any direct provisions of princes and rulers. Money debts, it is true, were recoverable from an early time. But this was not because the debtor had promised to repay the loan; it was because the money was deemed still to belong to the creditor, as if the identical coins were merely in the debtor's custody. The creditor sued to recover money, for centuries after the Norman Conquest, in exactly the same form which he would have used to demand possession of land; the action of debt closely resembled the "real actions," and, like them, might be finally determined by a judicial combat; and down to Blackstone's time the creditor was said to have a property in the debt--property which the debtor had "granted" him. Giving credit, in this way of thinking, is not reliance on the right to call hereafter for an act, the payment of so much current money or its equivalent, to be performed by the debtor, but merely suspension of the immediate right to possess one's own particular money, as the owner of a house let for a term suspends his right to occupy it. This was no road to the modern doctrine of contract, and the passage had to be made another way. Action for debt.