Generally speaking, Alfred’s laws differ from those of Ine, and still more from those of Kentish Ethelbert, in the direction of greater leniency, the amount of fine payable for injuries to the person being almost always considerably reduced. This tendency, when we compare Alfred’s and Ethelbert’s laws, is at first sight obscured by the fact that the fines imposed by the latter are expressed in terms of the Kentish scilling, which was worth four times as much as that of Wessex, but when we have made the necessary correction for this difference, it comes out very clearly. Thus the fine for cutting off the thumb was in Ethelbert’s code the equivalent of 80 shillings of Wessex, while under Alfred it was only 30. For the like injury to the middle finger it was respectively 32 and 15 shillings; for the “gold” or ring finger, 24 and 17. This remarkable diminution in the scale of pecuniary punishments was probably due, not simply to “mild-heartedness” on the part of the king and his _witan_, but also to the economic effect of the Danish ravages. So much of the portable wealth of the country had been carried off from hall and monastery to the homesteads of Scandinavia, that the value of gold and silver remaining in the land was sensibly increased, and a fine which was reasonable at the beginning of the eighth century became exorbitant at the close of the ninth. This abatement of pecuniary penalty is modified in a singular way in the case of forest trespass. It may be remembered that by the laws of Ine, a man going into a forest and felling timber for his own use was liable to a fine of 30 scillings for each tree so felled, up to three, but that 90 scillings was the maximum penalty. Now, by the laws of Alfred the penalty for each tree so felled was only 5 scillings, but there was no maximum. A forest-thief, therefore, who cut down twenty trees would fare worse under the new law than under the old. One would like to know what were the developments in English forestry which led to this singular modification of the law. Our attention begins to be directed to the public assemblies for the transaction of business, the local _moots_ which, as we know from other sources, had judicial as well as administrative duties to discharge, arranging the levy of men for the _fyrd_ and raising money for the equipment of ships, as well as settling important questions of inheritance and disputes about property. It was important that such meetings should not be disturbed by the brawls of unruly partisans of the litigants, and accordingly we find it enacted that “if any man fight before the king’s ealdorman in the _gemot_ (meeting), he shall pay his _wer_ and _wite_ as the law ordains for any assault that he may have committed, and in addition shall pay a fine (_wite_) of 120 scillings to the ealdorman”.