Even in the time of Tacitus the arable land of the Germans had not yet become private property.[27] It is in this common control, or common ownership, of wergeld that we may find the explanation of the absence of wergeld-payments for homicide within the clan. Seebohm, speaking of the Welsh system, says[28]: ‘A murder within this wider kindred was regarded as a family matter.... There was no blood-fine or _galanas_ within the kindred.’ We shall find at least one illustration of this important principle in the _Iliad_ of Homer.[29] It is not a complete explanation of the principle to assert, as Fustel de Coulanges would assert,[30] that the kin-slayer had offended his domestic gods and that no payment could permit the continued presence of the murderer at the ancestral hearth fire in which the life of a kinsman had been violently submerged. In the phratry different clans had a common worship, and the murderer who paid wergeld joined in that worship. We agree with Coulanges that the attitude of the domestic gods towards kin-slaying differed from that of the phratry-gods towards ordinary homicide. But why? Because primitive man creates gods in his own image and endows them with his own emotions. It is with man, not with gods, that the ultimate explanation lies. The real explanation of the principle is to be found, we think, in a tradition ultimately resting on the common ownership of property. Accepting this principle, we can understand more easily the punishment of kin-murder in tribal society. There are only three alternative penalties to wergeld: exile, bondage (or servitude) and death. It is natural to assume, and it has been rightly maintained,[31] that death was a loathsome penalty in days when relatives alone could avenge. It was therefore rarely, if ever, exacted. Bondage or servitude also, though sometimes found as a punishment for homicide,[32] would naturally be avoided as a sequel to kin-murder. There remains only the option of exile. Like Cain, the slayer of his brother, the kin-murderer must wander over the wide earth.[33] Expelled from his clan, his home, his property and his gods, he goes forth to slavery or to death in other lands. As a French writer puts it, ‘Alone, he has arrayed against him the universe.’[34]