fare. A man's relations and friends who had not revenged his death, would instantly have lost that reputation which constituted their principal security. The inhabitants of Friesland lived for a long time in a state of this kind. Most of the other German nations had already advanced a step beyond this in the time of Tacitus. Endless disorders, the unavoidable consequences of the right of self-revenge, had suggested to the wiser sort among them the necessity of magistrates, who should interpose their authority in private quarrels, and oblige the offended person or his relations to receive a present from the aggressor; that so a compensation being made for an injury, might prevent the consequences of an eternal resentment, which from private persons might extend to the public. And for fear that this manner of terminating differences should become a new source of them, the compensation was determined by an invariable rule, and commonly limited to a certain value in cattle, the only money known in those rude ages. A mark of submission of this sort satisfied men's pride as to the point of honour, gratified their avarice, and sufficiently secured them from a repetition of the offence. The Danes, in this respect, followed the steps of the neighbouring nations. Mere parity of reason might give one a right to suppose this, even if we had not more positive proofs; but without accumulating these unnecessarily, we need only cast our eyes on the ancient laws of the conquerors of Great Britain, most of which are still extant; and whoever will run over the collections published by Lambard, Wilkins, and Leibnitz, will not doubt but they were all dictated by the same spirit, and were really the same at the bottom. It will be sufficient to quote a few particulars, to enable us to judge of their general spirit; for this is all I undertake to show of them. As to their more particular minute circumstances, they have doubtless varied a thousand times, in different ages and coun. tries; but these we shall not descend to at present. The laws of the Saxons, as regulated by Charlemagne, and published by Leibnitz, established a composition in money for most sorts of crimes; and for want of money this was to be paid in the flesh of cattle, every limb and joint of which had its known value regulated by law. They carefully distin Leibnitz, Rer. Brunswic. tom. i. guished the different degrees of offence, as well as those of the rank which the offended person bore in the state. Accordingly for the murder of a noble or a prince the composition was 1440 sous*, and the same for every wound that deprived him of his hearing, sight, or use of his limbs. But if this injury was done to a free man, and not to a noble †, the composition was only 120 sous; at the same time the murder of a slave was rated but 30; which was precisely the price of a simple blow, that produced neither swelling nor blackness, if given to a prince or noble. Much the same proportions were observed by the law of the Angles. Wounds given to a maiden were estimated at double the rate they would have been, if given to a man of the same rank of life. It was not the same with a woman who had borne children. Outrages against modesty were also valued with a degree of exactness of which one would not have thought matters of that nature susceptible. "The laws of these people," says M. de Montesquieu, "judged of insults offered to men by the size of the wounds, nor did they show more refinement as to the offences committed against women; so that they seem to have measured injuries as one measures figures in geometry." These laws vary more in what relates to theft. By the law of the Saxons, it was in most cases punished with death. By that of the Angles, which doubtless approaches nearer to the laws of the Danish nations, the robber compounded by paying triple the value of what he had stolen. But when government had acquired a little more stability, and when the manners were a little more civilized, men were not satisfied with opposing to the disorder a barrier so often ineffectual. The magistrates appointed to watch over the public peace pretended that THEY were insulted as often as that peace was broken, and therefore, over and above the composition which was to atone for the offence, they exacted a fine, either as a satisfaction due to the public, or as a recompense for the trouble given themselves in making up the difference and in protecting the offender. These fines were for a long time all, or almost all If the author computes by modern money, it is 720 pence English, or about 31. sterling.-P. The original is Roda, whence comes the word Roturier, by which the French express at present one who is not a gentleman. Sixty pence, or five shillings sterling.-P. the punishment which could possibly prevail among a valiant and free people, who esteemed their blood too precious to be shed any other way than in battle. Their kings had for many ages no other revenue than what arose from these fines, and from their own private demesnes: all other kinds of imposi tion were not known till long after that period of time to which we at present confine our researches. Their If this way of punishing crimes may justly pass for singular, that of establishing proofs in the administration of justice may be esteemed no less so. Here all the ignorance, all the bar. barity of our ancestors manifest themselves so plainly, that it is not in the power of our reflections to add to them. embarrassment was so great when they endeavoured to distin guish truth from falsehood, that they were obliged to have recourse to the most strange expedients and most ridiculous practices. Thus they sometimes obliged the accused to produce a certain number of persons called Compurgators; not that these men had, or were supposed to have any knowledge of the affair in question, but they were simply to swear they were persuaded the accused spoke true. Besides this, they often appointed what was called the judiciary combat, and how absurd soever this custom was, it was so intimately connected with their opinions concerning destiny and providence, that it triumphed for a long time over religion, popes, and councils; and though a hundred times proscribed, as often revived and appeared again under different shapes. Lastly, when the discovery of truth appeared to them to exceed all human powers, they had recourse to supernatural means, and what they called divine judgments. They had many ways of consulting that oracle. For as, according to their notions, all the elements were animated by an intelligence as incorruptible in its justice as the deity whence it sprung, they thought they had nothing to do but to unite the accused person to one of these divinities, and so oblige it to declare by the manner of its acting upon him, what judgment it entertained of his innocence. Thus sometimes they cast him into a deep water, tied about with cords: if he sunk, that is, if the genius of the water received him into its bosom, it declared him to be innocent; if it rejected him, if he swam upon the surface, he was looked upon as convicted of the crime. This was called the watery ordeal and was more dangerous than it ap pears to have been at first sight; for though a man thrown into the water commonly sinks at first to the bottom, yet as they tied him about with large cords, " and withs," he sometimes swam on the surface spite of his teeth. This kind of proof indeed, as well as that of boiling water, was only for persons of inferior rank. Others handled hot iron, or put their hands into a red-hot_gauntlet, or walked blindfold over burning ploughshares. If at the end of certain days there remained any marks of the fire on the hands or feet, the accused were judged guilty; if not, he was acquitted. There is reason to think that, notwithstanding they took all possible precaution, they also had recourse to certain preservatives against the effects of fire, and perhaps the same that mountebanks in our times make use of as oft as they amuse the people with spectacles of the same kind. Besides this, men who were accustomed to hard labour, to the toils of hunting, and constant handling of arms, had rendered their skins so thick and callous, that they could not easily be hurt; and as for the ladies, they were generally allowed champions to undergo the trial for them. The proof by fire, or fiery-ordeal, seems to have been more in use afterwards, and founded upon a different train of reasoning; for in things of this nature, we must not expect such rude minds to act very consistently. : As for the ceremonies which accompanied these kinds of proof, the cases in which they were appointed, and the other minute circumstances, they varied in different times and places and as imitation and habit perpetuate customs long after the causes of them have ceased, the ordeal was practised during many ages by men, who doubtless believed nothing about the genii presiding over the several elements, or the other doctrines of the ancient religion*. I shall not enter on the minute history of the ordeal, &c., which was not peculiar to the ancient Danes, and may be found described in other books t. I thought proper only to mark the connection be Thus long after Christianity was established among the Anglo-Saxons, king Edward the Confessor (a reputed saint) is said to have put his mother to the proof of the burning ploughshares. And even down to our own times, the watery ordeal, or proof by swimming, has been employed by the vulgar for the trial of witchcraft, whenever they could find means to put it in practice.-P. Vid. Wormius in Monum. Danic. lib. i. c. 2, and Steph. Stephanius in his Notes on Saxo Grammaticus. NORTHERN ANTIQUITIES. tween them and the doctrines of that religion, which I de scribed in the preceding chapters: a connection which has been seldom attended to, and which shows that it is only for want of studying mankind that they appear to act wholly without motives or principles of conduct. It was king Valdemar the Second to whom the glory belongs of having abolished this absurd and inhuman practice in Denmark +. CHAPTER VIII. THE PASSION OF THE ANCIENT SCANDINAVIANS FOR ARMS: THEIR VALOUR: THE MANNER IN WHICH THEY MADE WAR. "Rome had reckoned from its foundation six hundred and forty years, when the arms of the Cimbri were first heard of among us. From that time to the present have elapsed two hundred and six years more. quering Germany. And in the course of so tedious a war, So long have we been in conwhat various losses have been sustained by each party? No nation has given us more frequent alarms; neither the Samnites, the Carthaginians, the Spaniards, the Gauls, nor even the Parthians: so much less vigour has the despotic power of Arsaces had, than the liberty of the Germans. For, except the defeat of Crassus, what has the conquered and prostrate Fast to object to the current of our success? Whereas the * He reigned from the year 1202 to 1241.-P. + I cannot conclude this subject without observing that we find some traces of the ordeal among the ancient Greeks and Romans. Thus in the Antigone of Sophocles, (Act II. Sc. 11.) we have the following remarkable passage, which shows it was not unknown in Greece:— "The guards accused each other; nought was proved, Offering in proof of innocence to grasp The burning steel, to walk thro' fire, and take Their solemn oath they knew not of the decd." See Franklin's Sophocles and note on the above passage. See also Stiernhök de Jur. Vet. Suec. lib. i. c. 8, apud Dalin, Sue. Rik. Hist. tom. i. ch. 7. Pliny, speaking of a feast, which the ancient Romans celebrated every year in honour of the Sun, observes that the priests, who were to be of the family of the Hirpians, danced on this occasion barefoot on burning coa's without burning themselves: this was apparently a relic of the fiery ordeal. Plin. Hist. Nat. lib. vii. 2. |
