Page:Petr Kropotkin - Organised Vengeance Called 'Justice', Henry Glasse - The Superstition of Government (1902).djvu/5

Rh takes more and more the character of Evaluation of the damage done—the value being different according to the rank of the wronged one: so much for a slave killed, so much for a peasant wounded, so much for a chief abused. The scales of valuation form the first barbarian codes. To fix the amount, the village community met; the bare facts of the case were ascertained by the enquiry of jurymen chosen in equal number (G or 12) by both parties or their families. The old members of the village or, better still, the bards, to whose memory the tradition is entrusted, or perhaps outside judges invited by the community, decide the compensation (simple restitution for theft) and the fine to the commune or to the gods.

But gradually, during the immigration of different tribes, many free communities are enslaved. On the same territory live, side by side, conquerors and conquered. Then come the priest and the bishop, feared sorcerers, and by and by the jurymen, the bards, the old men of the tribe are superseded in the valuation of Compensation by the delegates of the bishop or of the local lord. The fine becomes more and more important; the compensation to the wronged one less and less; the share of the community in the fine comes to naught; the whole payment is pocketed by the chief. The Old Testament provides these delegates with the necessary traditional example of judgment. Thus we see the modern judge evolving out of chosen jurymen at the same rate as the feudal system evolves out of the village community. The idea of Punishment is born, and soon drives away every other conception, especially under the action of the Church, which taking example by its Hebrew predecessors wants to reign by terror. An injury to a priest is no longer an injury to a man, it is an injury to the divinity, and no punishment is severe enough to chastise such a crime. The cruelty of the judgment increases as time goes on, and the secular power imitates the clerical power.

In the 10th and 11th centuries the mediæval city appears. Revolution after revolution, city after city expel the judge of the bishop, of the lord, of the duke. The cities make their Conjuration. At first the citizens swear to drop all contests arising from the lex talionis (law of retaliation) and, if new contests arise, never to appeal to external powers, but to settle everything among themselves. The Guild, the Parish, the Town community