Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law: Being an Essay Supplemental to (1) 'The English Village Community', (2) 'The Tribal System in Wales'Seebohm, Frederic
History
Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law: Being an Essay Supplemental to (1) 'The English Village Community', (2) 'The Tribal System in Wales'
Seebohm, Frederic
Anglo-Saxons; Law, Anglo-Saxon; Law, Medieval; Tribes -- Great Britain
Clause 3 enacts that if a slave, unknown to his master, shall slay a
freeman, the slave shall be delivered up to death and the master free
from liability. Clause 4 adds that if the master was privy to the crime
of his slave both should be delivered to death. Clause 5 enacts that if
the slave after the deed shall have disappeared, his master shall pay 30
solidi--the price of the slave--to the parentes of the slain. And lastly,
in clause 6, the parentes of the slain are in all these cases warned
that no one is to be answerable for the crime but the homicide himself,
‘because as we enact that the guilty shall be extirpated, so we cannot
allow the innocent to suffer wrong.’
The new law breaks away altogether from old tribal traditions, and an
attempt is made to treat homicide from the new point of view of reason
and justice as between one individual and another, with but little, if
any, regard to kindred.
[Sidenote: The traditional value of animals.]
From the law against theft we get a scale for the equation of cattle
&c. with gold. If a Burgundian or Roman ‘ingenuus’ steals away a slave,
horse, mare, ox, or cow, he is to lose his life, unless he takes refuge
in a church, and from the property of the criminal the price of the
stolen animal is, ‘in simplum,’ to be paid to the person robbed, unless
the thing stolen can be found and restored--_i.e._:
For the slave 25 solidi
For ‘best horse’ 10 ”
For moderate horse 5 ”
For mare 3 ”
For ox 2 ”
For cow 1 solidus.
Thus from these traditional values, retained even under new circumstances
by the Burgundian law, we learn that the wergeld of the middle class of
freemen, ‘mediocres in populo,’ of 200 solidi, was still regarded as the
equivalent of 100 oxen or 200 cows.
There is no doubt in this case that the solidi were those of the Imperial
standard. The Burgundian Kingdom was destroyed by the Franks in A.D.
534--_i.e._ before the issue by Merovingian princes of solidi and
trientes of the Merovingian standard.
II. THE WERGELDS OF THE LEX WISIGOTHORUM.
The laws of the Wisigoths are too Roman to be taken as evidence of what
may have been the ancient tribal wergelds of the Goths.
[Sidenote: The tribal polity of the Goths broken up by Roman influences.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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