Medieval France
. Germanic law codes required a sum known as “wergeld” (literally, “man money”) to be paid to the relatives (or in the case of a slave, the master) of one who was killed. The amount of the wergeld varied with the legal status, ethnic background, occupation, sex, and age of the victims, thus representing their social standing.
The taking of life was not technically a violation of Germanic laws and the victim’s relatives could seek an eye-for-an-eye vengeance, which often led to a bloody cycle of retaliatory deaths. Payment of the wergeld to the kinsfolk of the victim provided an honorable compensation for the death, and a vendetta could thus be avoided. However, a killer could refuse to pay the wergeld or the victim’s kin could refuse to accept it, and either refusal would initiate the blood feud.
Exact values varied among the law codes. In the Salic Law, the wergeld of the typical freeman (leudis) normally was 200 solidi, that of a member of the king’s entourage was 600, but a slave’s was only thirty-five. In the Burgun-dian Code, nobles had a wergeld of 300 solidi, lower classes 150, and slaves thirty.
(By comparison, the Ripuarian Code equated the value of a stallion with seven solidi, a cow with one, and a sword with three.)
The payment of one’s wergeld or a portion of it could sometimes be imposed as a penalty for certain crimes.
Steven Fanning
[See also: SALIC LAW]
Fischer, Katherine, trans. The Burgundian Code. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949.
Rivers, Theodore John, trans. The Laws of the Salian and Ripuarian Franks. New York: AMS, 1986.
Murray, Alexander Callander. Germanic Kinship Structure: Studies in Law and Society in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983, pp. 135–55.
Wallace-Hadrill, J.M. The Long-Haired Kings and Other Studies in Frankish History. London: Methuen, 1962.
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