Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/113

 3. POLLOCK: ANGLO-SAXON LAW 99 kinsfolk were entitled to demand from his slayer, and which sometimes he might have to pay for his own offences ; and this was the more important because the weight of a man's oath also varied with it. A thegn (which would be more closely represented by " gentilhomme " than by " noble- man ") had a wergild six times as great as a ceorVs^ or common man's, and his oath counted for six common oaths before the court.^ All free men, noble or simple, looked to their kindred as their natural helpers and avengers ; and one chief office of early criminal law was to regulate the blood- feud until there was a power strong enough to supersede it. We collect from the general tenor of the Anglo-Saxon laws that the evils most frequently calling for remedy were manslaying, wounding, and cattle-stealing; it is obvious enough that the latter, when followed by pursuit in hot blood, was a natural and prolific source of the two former. The rules dealing with such wrongs or crimes (for archaic laws draw no firm line between public offence and private injury) present a strange contrast of crude ideas and minute speci- fication, as it appears at first sight. Both are however really due to similar conditions. A society which is incapable of refined conceptions, but is advanced enough to require equal rules of some kind and to limit the ordinary power of its rulers, is likewise incapable of leaving any play for judicial discretion. Anglo-Saxon courts had not the means of appor- tioning punishment to guilt in the particular case, or assess- ing compensation according to the actual damage, any more than of deciding on the merits of conflicting claims according to the evidence. Thus the only way remaining open was to fix an equivalent in money or in kind for each particular injury: ' so much for life and so much for every limb and member of the human body. The same thing occurs with even greater profusion of detail in the other Germanic compilations of the Dark Ages. In the latter days of Anglo-Saxon mon- through so much change of meaning and application that they cannot be safely used for historical purposes. now obscure, and were probably no less obscure in the thirteenth cen- tury: they seem to have been disregarded very soon after the Conquest
 * The modern forms of these words, thane and churl, have passed
 * There were minor distinctions between ranks of free men which are