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Travel obligations and internet issues are going to be interfering with daily posts for at least some of the next 10 days to two weeks. So nobody will go into withdrawal, however, The Legal Genealogist offers…

The term of the day:

UNGELD.

“In Saxon law, an outlaw; a person whose murder required no composition to be made, or weregeld to be paid, by his slayer.”1

Oh, and just so you know… weregeld, or weregild, or wergild was “the price of homicide, or other atrocious personal offense, paid partly to the king for the loss of a subject, partly to the lord for the loss of a vassal, and partly to the next of kin of the injured person. In the Anglo-Saxon laws, the amount of compensation varied with the degree or rank of the party slain.”2

outlaw


SOURCES

  1. Henry Campbell Black, A Dictionary of Law (St. Paul, Minn. : West, 1891), 1200, “ungeld.”
  2. Ibid., 1239, “weregild.”
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