What Is a Person Worth in Cattle? Early Law Had a Price List
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Early medieval law codes set a payment owed to a dead person's family by whoever killed them, with the amount fixed by the victim's rank. The system was designed to stop feuds rather than to punish.
What the payment was for
In societies without police, prisons or a prosecuting state, a killing was a matter between families, and the expected response was retaliation, which invited counter-retaliation and could consume both kin groups for generations. The payment offered an alternative that everybody could accept, a fixed sum owed by the killer and their family to the victim's family, the acceptance of which formally ended the matter. Refusing an offered payment was itself a serious step, since it announced that the feud would continue. The purpose was therefore settlement rather than punishment, and the codes are best read as tariffs for ending disputes.
How the amounts were set
The sums were graded in detail and the gradations reveal the society:
- •Rank determined the price, with a noble worth many times a free farmer
- •An unfree person was valued as property, paid to their owner
- •Clergy carried their own rates, frequently high ones
- •Women's rates varied, in some codes rising during childbearing years
- •Killing a foreigner or a stranger attracted a lower rate
- •Injuries had their own detailed schedules, by body part
The catalogue of injuries
The codes extend the principle well beyond killing and the resulting lists are remarkable documents. Anglo-Saxon and continental codes price the loss of each finger separately and differently, distinguish a front tooth from a back one, set rates for an ear that is cut off against one that is merely pierced, and specify what is owed if a wound is visible when the victim is dressed. Some price a wound by how many bones can be heard rattling in a bowl when removed. The detail served a practical purpose, which was to remove argument, since a schedule that anticipates the case leaves nothing for the parties to dispute except the facts.
Who actually paid
The obligation did not fall on the killer alone, and understanding that is essential to understanding why the system worked. Kin groups were liable collectively, with the codes setting out which relatives owed what proportion and in what order, extending several degrees outward. That spread a sum that would have ruined any individual across a group that could bear it, which made payment possible rather than theoretical. It also gave every relative a direct financial interest in restraining a violent kinsman, since his actions would cost them, which is a social control mechanism operating in advance rather than after the fact. A killer without kin was in serious difficulty and frequently faced enslavement or outlawry instead.
How it faded
The system was displaced as rulers asserted that crime offended the king or the state rather than only the victim's family, which changed who the wrong was done to and therefore who was owed. Kings began taking a share of the payment, then claiming that certain acts could not be settled by payment at all, and finally treating punishment as the state's business and compensation as a separate civil matter. That division persists, since a modern killing produces a criminal prosecution by the state and, separately, a civil claim by the family. Compensation schemes for victims of crime and wrongful death damages are recognisable descendants, and several legal systems retain a direct version.
The takeaway
A fixed payment owed to a dead person's family offered an alternative to a feud that both sides could accept, which is why early codes are tariffs rather than punishments. Rates were graded by rank and extended into detailed schedules for injuries, priced finger by finger and tooth by tooth, specifically to leave nothing to argue about. Rulers ended it by claiming that the wrong was done to the state.