(wergild, for Anglo-Saxons and Franks) or 'honour-price' (galanas in Welsh, lóg n-enech in Irish). A free Frank was worth 200 solidi, a free Anglo-Saxon zoo shillings, a free Irishman 6 séts, and aristocrats perhaps three times those sums or more. In the event of murder these were the sums paid to the man's kin by the murderer and his kin. The value of a man's oath in Court among the Irish, Welsh, and English might be measured in terms of his 'man price'; an oath sworn by an aristocrat or a king would be worth more than that of an ordinary man and, depending on the seriousness of the crime, might serve to clear himself or another of the charge.

In all these societies the kin-group was an important social and legal institution. We have seen in the previous section that the kin possessed rights in land held by individual heads of family, unless the king had granted that land, or transformed its legal status. The kin also had certain duties in law, notably that of bringing anyone who had wronged the kin to justice. In extreme cases the kin could kill someone who murdered one of their number. This so-called 'blood feud' was accepted, if occasionally deplored, by churchmen, because without its threat the guilty person would seldom be induced to come to court. All court cases were private affairs, the injured party or kin bringing the case and making the accusation; whoever presided over the court, a king, his representative, or a local dignitary, merely acted as arbitrator. Among each people there were men recognized as legal experts: Frankish rachinburgii or English 'doomsmen'. In Ireland lawmen formed a well-defined learned class; whereas our primary legal sources in other barbarian kingdoms consist of law codes issued in the name of the king, from Ireland we have law tracts written by individual jurists, who themselves played a major role in the administration of the law. But we must not assume that there is a great contrast between Ireland, in which jurists were supreme in the law, and the rest of barbarian Europe, in which kings were supreme. For most of the time the truth, that is, legal practice, lay somewhere in between. The example of the Roman emperor--'the word of the prince is law'--was always there to inspire western kings. Roman example persuaded

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