“clans rising against clans,” appealed to Norman varingiar to be their judges and commanders of warrior scholae; and when we see the knyazes, or dukes, elected for the next two hundred years always from the same Norman family, we cannot but recognize that the Slavonians trusted to the Normans for a better knowledge of the law which would be equally recognized as good by different Slavonian kins.  In this case the possession of runes, used for the transmission of old customs, was a decided advantage in favour of the Normans; but in other cases there are faint indications that the “eldest” branch of the stem, the supposed motherbranch, was appealed to to supply the judges, and its decisions were relied upon as just;(7) while at a later epoch we see a distinct tendency towards taking the sentence-finders from the Christian clergy, which, at that time, kept still to the fundamental, now forgotten, principle of Christianity, that retaliation is no act of justice.  At that time the Christian clergy opened the churches as places of asylum for those who fled from blood revenge, and they willingly acted as arbiters in criminal cases, always opposing the old tribal principle of life for life and wound for wound.  In short, the deeper we penetrate into the history of early institutions, the less we find grounds for the military theory of origin of authority.  Even that power which later on became such a source of oppression seems, on the contrary, to have found its origin in the peaceful inclinations of the masses.

In all these cases the fred, which often amounted to half the compensation, went to the folkmote, and from times immemorial it used to be applied to works of common utility and defence.  It has still the same destination (the erection of towers) among the Kabyles and certain Mongolian stems; and we have direct evidence that even several centuries later the judicial fines, in Pskov and several French and German cities, continued to be used for the repair of the city walls.(8) It was thus quite natural that the fines should be handed over to the sentence-finder, who was bound, in return, both to maintain the schola of armed men to whom the defence of the territory was trusted, and to execute the sentences.  This became a universal custom in the eighth and ninth centuries, even when the sentence-finder was an elected bishop.  The germ of a combination of what we should now call the judicial power and the executive thus made its appearance.  But to these two functions the attributions of the duke or king were strictly limited.  He was no ruler of the people—­the supreme power still belonging to the folkmote—­not even a commander of the popular militia; when the folk took to arms, it marched under a separate, also elected, commander, who was not a subordinate, but an equal to the king.(9) The king was a lord on his personal domain only.  In fact, in barbarian language, the word konung, koning, or cyning synonymous with the Latin rex, had no other