Page:The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes.djvu/36

Rh it is said, “If any one's slave slay a freeman, whoever it be, let the owner pay with a hundred shillings, give up the slayer,” &c. There are several other similar provisions. In the nearly contemporaneous laws of Ine, the surrender and payment are simple alternatives. “If a Wessex slave slay an Englishman, then shall he who owns him deliver him up to the lord and the kindred, or give sixty shillings for his life.” Alfred's laws ( 871-901) have a like provision as to cattle. “If a neat wound a man, let the neat be delivered up or compounded for.” And Alfred, although two hundred years later than the first English lawgivers who have been quoted, seems to have gone back to more primitive notions than we find before his time. For the same principle is extended to the case of a tree by which a man is killed. “If, at their common work, one man slay another unwilfully, let the tree be given to the kindred, and let them have it off the land within thirty nights. Or let him take possession of it who owns the wood.”

It is not inapposite to compare what Mr. Tylor has mentioned concerning the rude Kukis of Southern Asia. “If a tiger killed a Kuki, his family were in disgrace till they had retaliated by killing and eating this tiger, or another; but further, if a man was killed by a fall from a tree, his relatives would take their revenge by cutting the tree down, and scattering it in chips.”

To return to the English, the later laws, from about a hundred years after Alfred down to the collection known as the laws of Henry I., compiled long after the Conquest,