impossible, but only to regulate and moderate them. The laws of Alfred enjoin, that if any one know that his enemy or aggressor, after doing him an injury, resolves to keep within his own house and his own lands,* he shall not fight him, till he require compensation for the injury. If he be strong enough to besiege him in his house, he may do it for seven days without attacking him; and if the aggressor be willing, during that time, to surrender himself and his arms, his adversary may detain him thirty days, but is afterwards obliged to restore him safe to his kindred," and be content with the compensation." If the criminal fly to the temple, that sanctuary must not be violated. Where the assailant has not force sufficient to besiege the criminal in his house, he must apply to the alderman for assistance; and if the alderman refuse aid, the assailant must have recourse to the king; and he is not allowed to assault the house till after this supreme magistrate has refused assistance. If any one meet with his enemy, and be ignorant that he was resolved to keep within his own lands, he must, before he attack him, require him to surrender himself prisoner, and deliver up his arms; in which case he may detain him thirty days; but if he refuse to deliver up his arms, it is then lawful to fight him. A slave may fight in his master's quarrel: a father may fight in his son's with any one, except with his master.† It was enacted by King Ina, that no man should take revenge for an injury till he had first demanded compensation, and had been refused it.‡ King Edmond, in the preamble to his laws, mentions the general misery occasioned by the multiplicity of private feuds and battles; and he establishes several expedients for remedying this grievance. He ordains that if any one commit murder, he may, with the assistance of his kindred, pay within a twelvemonth the fine of his crime; and if they abandon him, he shall alone sustain the deadly feud or quarrel with the kindred of the murdered person: his own kindred are free from the feud, but on condition that they neither converse with the criminal, nor supply him with meat or other necessaries: if any of them, after renouncing him, receive him into their house, or give him assistance, they are finable to the king, and *The addition of these last words in Italics appears necessary from what follows in the same law. LL. Inæ, sect. 9. LL. Elf. sect. 28. Wilkins, p. 43. are involved in the feud. If the kindred of the murdered person take revenge on any but the criminal himself, after he is abandoned by his kindred, all their property is forfeited, and they are declared to be enemies to the king and all his friends.* It is also ordained that the fine for murder shall never be remitted by the king,† and that no criminal shall be killed who flies to the church, or any of the king's towns; and the king himself declares, that his house shall give no protection to murderers, till they have satisfied the church by their penance, and the kindred of the deceased by making compensation. The method appointed for transacting this composition is found in the same law.|| These attempts of Edmond, to contract and diminish the feuds, were contrary to the ancient spirit of the northern barbarians, and were a step towards a more regular administration of justice. By the salic law, any man might, by a public declaration, exempt himself from his family quarrels: but then he was considered by the law as no longer belonging to the family; and he was deprived of all right of succession, as the punishment of his cowardice.¶ The price of the king's head, or his weregild, as it was then called, was by law thirty thousand thrimsas, near thirteen hundred pounds of present money. The price of the prince's head was fifteen thousand thrimsas; that of a bishop's or alderman's, eight thousand; a sheriff's, four thousand; a thane's or clergyman's, two thousand; a ccorle's, two hundred and sixty-six. These prices were fixed by the laws of the Angles. By the Mercian law, the price of a ceorle's head was two hundred shillings; that of a thane's, six times as much; that of a king's, six times more." By the laws of Kent, the price of the archbishop's head was higher than that of the king's. Such respect was then paid to the ecclesiastics! It must be understood, that where a person was unable or unwilling to pay the fine, he was put out of the protection of law, and the kindred of the deceased had liberty to punish him as they thought proper. ** Some antiquaries ‡‡ have thought that these compensations were only given for manslaughter, not for wilful murder: but ++ LL. Elthredi, apud Wilkins, p. 110. + LL. Edm. sect. 3. LL. Edm. sect. 7. **Wilkins, p. 71, 72. Tyrrel, Introduct. vol. i. p. 126. Carte, vol. i. p. 366. H no such distinction appears in the laws; and it is contradicted by the practice of all the other barbarous nations,* by that of the ancient Germans,† and by that curious monument above mentioned of Saxon antiquity, preserved by Hickes. There is indeed a law of Alfred's which makes wilful murder capital;‡ but this seems only to have been an attempt of that great legislator towards establishing a better police in the kingdom, and it probably remained without execution. By the laws of the same prince, a conspiracy against the life of the king might be redeemed by a fine. The price of all kinds of wounds was likewise fixed by the Saxon laws a wound of an inch long under the hair was paid with one shilling: one of a like size in the face, two shillings; thirty shillings for the loss of an ear; and so forth. There seems not to have been any difference made, according to the dignity of the person. By the laws of Ethelbert, any one who committed adultery with his neighbor's wife was obliged to pay him a fine, and buy him another wife.¶ These institutions are not peculiar to the ancient Germans. They seem to be the necessary progress of criminal jurisprudence among every free people, where the will of the sovereign is not implicitly obeyed. We find them among the ancient Greeks during the time of the Trojan war. Compositions for murder are mentioned in Nestor's speech to Achilles, in the ninth Iliad, and are called nova. The Irish, who never had any connections with the German nations, adopted the same practice till very lately; and the price of a man's head was called among them his "eric;" as we learn from Sir John Davis. The same custom seems also to have prevailed among the Jews.** Theft and robbery were frequent among the Anglo-Saxons. In order to impose some check upon these crimes, it was ordained, that no man should sell or buy any thing above twenty pence value, except in open market; it and every bargain of sale must be executed before witnesses.‡‡ Gangs * Lindenbrogius, passim. + Tacit. de Mor. Germ. LL. Elf. sect. 12. Wilkins, p. 29. It is probable that by wilful murder Alfred means a treacherous murder, committed by one who has no declared feud with another. § LL. Elf. sect. 4. Wilkins, p. 35. LL. Elf. sect. 40. See also LL. Ethelb. sect. 34, etc. TLL. Ethelb. sect. 32. ++ LL. Æthelst. sect. 12. ** Exod. cap. xxi. 29, 30. ILL. Æthelst. sect. 10, 12. LL. Edg. apud Wilkins, p. 80. LL. Ethelredi, sect. 4, apud Wilkins, p. 103. Hloth. et Eadm. sect. 16. LL. Canut. sect. 22. 66 of robbers much disturbed the peace of the country; and the law determined that a tribe of banditti, consisting of between seven and thirty-five persons, was to be called a turma," or troop; any greater company was denominated an army.' The punishments for this crime were various, but none of them capital. If any man could track his stolen cattle into another's ground, the latter was obliged to show the tracks out of it, or pay their value.‡ Rebellion, to whatever excess it was carried, was not capital, but might be redeemed by a sum of money. The legislators, knowing it impossible to prevent all disorders, only imposed a higher fine on breaches of the peace committed in the king's court, or before an alderman or bishop. An alehouse, too, seems to have been considered as a privileged place; and any quarrels that arose there were more severely punished than elsewhere.|| If the manner of punishing crimes among the AngloSaxons appear singular, the proofs were not less so; and were also the natural result of the situation of those people. Whatever we may imagine concerning the usual truth and sincerity of men who live in a rude and barbarous state, there is much more falsehood, and even perjury, among them, than among civilized nations: virtue, which is nothing but a more enlarged and more cultivated reason, never flourishes to any degree, nor is founded on steady principles of honor, except where a good education becomes general; and where men are taught the pernicious consequences of vice, treachery, and immorality. Even superstition, though more prevalent among ignorant nations, is but a poor supply for the defects in knowledge and education; our European ancestors, who employed every moment the expedient of swearing on extraordinary crosses and relics, were less honorable in all engagements than their posterity, who from experience have omitted those ineffectual securities. This general proneness to perjury was much increased by the usual want of discernment in judges, who could not discuss an intricate evidence, and were obliged to number, not weigh, the testimony of the * LL. Inæ, sect. 12. + LL. Inæ, sect. 37. ILL. Æthelst. sect. 2. Wilkins, p. 63. § LL. Ethelredi, apud Wilkins, p. 110. LL. Ælf. sect. 4. Wilkins, p. 35. LL. Hloth. et Eadm. sect. 12, 13. LL. Ethelr. apud Wilkins, P. 117. witnesses.* Hence the ridiculous practice of obliging men to bring compurgators, who, as they did not pretend to know any thing of the fact, expressed upon oath, that they believed the person spoke true; and these compurgators were in some cases multiplied to the number of three hundred.† The practice also of single combat was employed by most nations on the continent as a remedy against false evidence; ‡ and though it was frequently dropped, from the opposition of the clergy, it was continually revived, from experience of the falsehood attending the testimony of witnesses. It became at last a species of jurisprudence: the cases were determined by law, in which the party might challenge his adversary, or the witnesses, or the judge himself;|| and though these customs were absurd, they were rather an improvement on the methods of trial which had formerly been practised among those barbarous nations, and which still prevailed among the Anglo-Saxons. When any controversy about a fact became too intricate for those ignorant judges to unravel, they had recourse to what they called the judgment of God, that is, to fortune. Their methods of consulting this oracle were various. One of them was the decision by the cross: it was practised in this manner: When a person was accused of any crime, he first cleared himself by oath, and he was attended by eleven compurgators. He next took two pieces of wood, one of which was marked. with the sign of the cross, and wrapping both up in wool, he placed them on the altar, or on some celebrated relic. After solemn prayers for the success of the experiment, a priest, or in his stead some unexperienced youth, took up one of the pieces of wood, and if he happened upon that which was marked with the figure of the cross, the person was pronounced innocent; if otherwise, guilty. This practice, as it arose from superstition, was abolished by it in France. emperor, Lewis the Debonnaire, prohibited that method of The * Sometimes the laws fixed easy general rules for weighing the credibility of witnesses. A man whose life was estimated at a hundred and twenty shillings, counterbalanced six ceorles, each of whose ives was only valued at twenty shillings, and his oath was esteemed equivalent to that of all the six. See Wilkins, p. 72. + Præf. Nicol. ad Wilkins, p. 11. LL. Burgund. cap. 45. LL. Lomb. lib. ii. tit. 55, cap. 34. LL. Frison. tit. 14, apud Lindenbrog. p. 496. |