Our Legal Heritage | Page 6

subsistence. Each ox was owned by a
different man as was the plough. Strips of land for agriculture were
added from waste land as the community grew.
There were villages which had one or two market days in each week.
Cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry, calves, and rabbits were sold there.
Flint workers mined with deer antler picks and ox shoulder blade
shovels for flint to grind into axes, spearheads, and arrowheads. People
used bone and stone tools, such as stone hammers, and then bronze and
iron tools, weapons, breast plates, and horse bits, which were formed
from moulds and/or forged by bronze smiths and blacksmiths.
Weapons included bows and arrows, flint and copper daggers, stone
axes, and shields of wood with bronze mountings. The warriors fought
with chariots drawn by two horses. The horse harnesses had bronze
fittings. The chariots had wood wheels, later with iron rims. When
bronze came into use, there was a demand for its constituent parts:
copper and tin, which were traded by rafts on waterways and the sea.
Lead was mined. Wrought iroin bars were used as currency.
Corpses were buried far away from any village in wood coffins, except
for Kings, who were placed in stone coffins after being wrapped in
linen. Possessions were buried with them.
With the ability to grow food and the acquisition of land by conquest,
for instance by invading Angles and Saxons, the population grew.
There were different classes of men such as eorls, ceorls [free farmers],
and slaves. They dressed differently. Freemen had long hair and beards.
Slaves' hair was shorn from their heads so that they were bald. Slaves
were chained and often traded. Prisoners taken in battle, e.g. Britons,
became slaves. Criminals became slaves of the person wronged or of
the King. Sometimes a father pressed by need sold his children or his
wife into bondage. Debtors, who increased in number during famine,
which occurred regularly, became slaves by giving up the freeman's
sword and spear, picking up a slave's mattock [pick ax for the soils],
and placing their head within a master's hands. Children with a slave
parent were slaves. The slaves lived in huts around the homes of big
landholders, which were made of logs and consisted on one large room

or hall. An open hearth was in the middle of the earthen floor, which
was strewn with rushes. There was a hole in the roof to let out the
smoke. Here the landholder and his men would eat meat, bread, salt,
hot spiced ale, and mead while listening to minstrels sing about the
heroic deeds of their ancestors. Physical strength and endurance in
adversity were admired traits. Slaves often were used as grain-grinders,
ploughmen, sowers, haywards, woodwards, shepherds, goatherds,
swineherds, oxherds, cowherds, dairymaids, and barnmen. A lord could
kill his slave at will.
The people were worshipping pagan gods when St. Augustine came to
England in 596 A.D. to Christianize them. King AEthelbert of Kent and
his wife, who had been raised Christian on the continent, met him when
he arrived. The King gave him land where there were ruins of an old
city. Augustine used stones from the ruins to build a church which was
later called Canterbury. He also built the first St. Paul's church in what
was later called London. Aethelbert and his men who fought with him
and ate in his household [gesiths] became Christian.
Augustine knew how to write, but King AEthelbert did not. The King
announced his laws at meetings of his people and his eorls would
decide the punishments. There was a fine of 120s. for disregarding a
command of the King. He and Augustine decided to write down some
of these laws, which now included the King's new law concerning the
church.
These laws concern personal injury, murder, theft, burglary, marriage,
adultery, and inheritance. The blood feud's private revenge for killing
had been replaced by payment of compensation to the dead man's
kindred. One paid a man's "wergeld" [worth] to his kindred for causing
his wrongful death. The wergeld [wer] of an aetheling was 1500s., of
an eorl, 300s., of a ceorl, 100s., of a laet [agricultural serf in Kent],
40-80s., and of a slave nothing. At this time a shilling could buy a cow
in Kent or a sheep elsewhere. If a ceorl killed an eorl, he paid three
times as much as an eorl would have paid as murderer. The penalty for
slander was tearing out of the tongue. If an aetheling were guilty of this
offense, his tongue was worth five times that of a coerl, so he had to

pay proportionately more to ransom it.
The Law
"THESE ARE THE DOOMS [DECREES] WHICH KING
AETHELBERHT ESTABLISHED IN THE DAYS OF AUGUSTINE
1. [Theft of] the property of God and of the church [shall