and pestilences, those pioneers began to repay their debts, they fell into servile obligations towards the protector of the territory.  Wealth undoubtedly did accumulate in this way, and power always follows wealth.(4) And yet, the more we penetrate into the life of those times, the sixth and seventh centuries of our era, the more we see that another element, besides wealth and military force, was required to constitute the authority of the few.  It was an element of law and tight, a desire of the masses to maintain peace, and to establish what they considered to be justice, which gave to the chieftains of the scholae—­kings, dukes, knyazes, and the like—­the force they acquired two or three hundred years later.  That same idea of justice, conceived as an adequate revenge for the wrong done, which had grown in the tribal stage, now passed as a red thread through the history of subsequent institutions, and, much more even than military or economic causes, it became the basis upon which the authority of the kings and the feudal lords was founded.

In fact, one of the chief preoccupations of the barbarian village community always was, as it still is with our barbarian contemporaries, to put a speedy end to the feuds which arose from the then current conception of justice.  When a quarrel took place, the community at once interfered, and after the folkmote had heard the case, it settled the amount of composition (wergeld) to be paid to the wronged person, or to his family, as well as the fred, or fine for breach of peace, which had to be paid to the community.  Interior quarrels were easily appeased in this way.  But when feuds broke out between two different tribes, or two confederations of tribes, notwithstanding all measures taken to prevent them,(5) the difficulty was to find an arbiter or sentence-finder whose decision should be accepted by both parties alike, both for his impartiality and for his knowledge of the oldest law.  The difficulty was the greater as the customary laws of different tribes and confederations were at variance as to the compensation due in different cases.  It therefore became habitual to take the sentence-finder from among such families, or such tribes, as were reputed for keeping the law of old in its purity; of being versed in the songs, triads, sagas, etc., by means of which law was perpetuated in memory; and to retain law in this way became a sort of art, a “mystery,” carefully transmitted in certain families from generation to generation.  Thus in Iceland, and in other Scandinavian lands, at every Allthing, or national folkmote, a lovsogmathr used to recite the whole law from memory for the enlightening of the assembly; and in Ireland there was, as is known, a special class of men reputed for the knowledge of the old traditions, and therefore enjoying a great authority as judges.(6) Again, when we are told by the Russian annals that some stems of North-West Russia, moved by the growing disorder which resulted from