And, apart from this monetary question, the clause is interesting as marking the claim that all ecclesiastical causes should be settled by the clergy themselves. In case of crime by an ecclesiastic against a layman the Church reserved the right to stop the layman’s prosecution by payment of the wergeld or other satisfaction. At the same time the Church was to claim double compensation from laymen committing crime against nuns. It is impossible to disassociate this document from the letter of Bede describing the religious anarchy of the diocese caused by the abuses of the loose monastic system in vogue, and urging the newly appointed prelate, who was not yet Archbishop, to undertake their energetic reformation. [Sidenote: The Church succumbed to the wergeld system.] But for the present purpose the real worth of these statements is the independent evidence they give of the continued strength of the wergeld system and the force of tribal custom in the Northumbrian kingdom before the Norse invasions. The sense of individualism in Christianity was opposed to the solidarity and joint responsibility of the kindred. But instead of fighting against the wergeld system the Church had actually succumbed to it, and adopted it for its own advantage, placing a money price upon the blood of its several ecclesiastical ranks, making the value of the priest four times that of the monk. The system of compurgation, again, was a part of tribal usage. The Church adopted it and graduated the worth of the oaths of its various grades according to secular usage, making the oath of the priest in evidence four times the value of that of the monk. In other words, in England, as on the Continent, the clergy, instead of combating tribal custom in these matters, took their place in the order of secular rank according to their several grades, bishops claiming the wergeld of princes, and priests that of thanes, with, however, the obviously useful reservation that if their secular rank by parentage and birth should be higher than their ecclesiastical grade, the higher wergeld should be theirs. All this we see in the course of being introduced into Northumbrian usage in answer to local inquiry and local needs, upon the authority of perhaps the very wisest of Saxon prelates. The wisdom of such accommodation as this on the part of the Church to pagan tribal usage is not the matter in question. The point of the evidence is the proof it gives of the continued strength of tribal usage in England after many generations of occupation and settlement. III. THE DOOMS OF INE, A.D. 688-725. The Dooms of King Ine occupy so important a position as the earliest direct information upon Anglo-Saxon custom apart from Kent that they demand careful separate study. We ought to be able to learn something from them of the aim and spirit of legislation in Wessex two centuries before King Alfred added them to his laws. * * * * *