Law 42 in Alfred’s code illustrates in an interesting manner that gradual transition from the blood-feud to the law-suit which was perhaps the most important conquest of Teutonic civilisation. By the various sections of this law it is provided that no man who has a grievance against another shall fight his foe until he has first demanded justice of him. That done, however, and justice denied, he may, if he have a sufficiently strong body of friends to back him, besiege the defendant for seven days. Should that blockade bring about a surrender and a disarmament, he must keep his adversary in custody for thirty days, sending word to his kinship that they may come and pay the mulct for which the prisoner is liable. What is to happen if the surrender does not take place at the end of the seven days, or the payment at the end of the thirty, we are not informed, but it seems to be implied that the claimant may then fight and even slay his enemy without guilt. If the plaintiff have not sufficient power to besiege his foe, he must ride to the ealdorman and demand his aid. Failing that, he must seek redress of the king, before he takes it upon himself to fight his foe. Moreover, a man might always fight for his lord or his kinsman without incurring the penalties of blood-guiltiness, and so too he could wage “lawful war” with the seducer of his wife, his sister, or his mother. We see that the ideas of the old blood-feud and of the so-called “Fist-right” still lingered in the mind even of so wise and religious a legislator as Alfred. Redress of wrongs by the action of courts of law might be the ideal, but in the actual Saxon world private warfare must still be allowed, and all that the king could hope to accomplish was to confine it within narrow bounds and regulate its procedure. On the condition of the servile class, the _theows_ and _esnes_, in the time of Alfred, not much light is thrown by Alfred’s Doom-book. We learn, however, that there was already a large class of free-men working for wages, for whose holidays, amounting in all to about thirty-six days in the year, the forty-third of Alfred’s laws made provision. From this enactment the _theows_ and _esnes_ are expressly excluded, but it is provided that all men in servile condition shall have the four Wednesdays in the Ember-weeks, on which days they are graciously permitted to make a present of their labour to any one who may have helped them in God’s name, or even to work for themselves. There is also a curious provision (law 20) exempting from liability the lord of a monk who has received money on deposit which he has failed to restore. This passage coincides with some others which seem to indicate that owing to the ruin of the monasteries wrought by the Danes, many of the monks, in order to keep body and soul together, accepted a servile position on the estate or in the house of some great landowner.