"Anglo-Saxon Punishments: The Price of a Pinky" Topic

"It seems like just about every depiction of the Middle Ages – especially the so-called Dark Ages – involves people swinging weapons around willy-nilly and lopping off body parts, blood flying everywhere. While there's no arguing with the fact that the medieval period was a violent time, daily life wasn't quite as crazy as all that. People actually appreciated their body parts and wanted to keep them, so they had a bit of restraint when it came to chopping off someone else's. Blood feuds were a real thing, which meant that a person had to be careful who he harmed, lest the bloodshed come back on him…"
Main page
link

Amicalement
Armand

Many years ago I attended a lecture at Uni on some of the 'other' fines for trespass on a person. The fines for touching a woman increased from the foot up to the knee, but went down if the trespass went above the knee.

The new season of "Vikings" is dealing with blood feuds.

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

Mmh… Having read and written about Germanic law, I must disagree. There is a fundamental flaw in this reconstruction, a basic misunderstanding: you don't really understand the shock of the fall of the Roman Empire and the transition to the Middle Ages if you don't understand this. These "Dooms" are not penal law in the modern sense: there is no State authority, no superior power that can enforce them if the parties do not agree, though of course there is something like moral suasion. What we have here is the old Indo-European concept of law that you can already find described in the Iliad, in the description of Achilles' shield (village elders trying to convince a muredered man's relatives to accept wergild, instead of taking revenge). This is true for the Anglo-Saxons in England as well as for the Langobards in Italy, and whether the laws are written in Old English or in Latin. It is a radically different conception of the world from the Roman one, where at least theoretically you had the Rule of Law.

By the way, the word "faida", that modern Italians usually associate with the mafia, is indeed a Langobard one, so that the scribe of the Langobard laws feels compelled to give a translation: "faida, id est inimicitia" ("faida, i.e. enmity").