Clearly they are not stated in different solidi, for if for a moment we take them to be so, then the two eyes of the nobilis would be paid for at a higher value than his life.
The solidi must be silver solidi.
Further, if we look at these payments for wounds carefully, it becomes clear that they cannot be gold values. Three hundred and sixty gold solidi for a thumb and 260 for the little finger of a nobilis are quite impossible fines. The little finger of the Saxon nobilis cannot have been valued at more than the ordinary freeman’s wergeld under the Salic and Ripuarian Laws.
We conclude then that, in spite of the last clause in the law, these values, both for wounds and homicide, are silver values, and that the figures in the text have at some date or other been substituted for the original ones to meet the change in the currency.
Let us try to realise what the effect upon the wergelds of the Lex Saxonum would be of Charlemagne’s substitution of the silver solidus of 12d. for the gold solidus.
Up to this time the wergelds had been paid in bullocks valued in gold at the solidus of two tremisses, and the equation was one no doubt of ancient custom. Now the Capitularies made them payable in silver at 12d. to the solidus.
Confusion in the currency.
One result became at once apparent. In the Saxon district the value of the ox went up, as we have seen, from two of the gold solidi to ten of the new silver solidi—an excessive rise, no doubt, and one likely to startle everybody. As regards most debts the change did not matter very much. The debtor got the advantage. But as regards wergelds hitherto payable in cattle and in gold it mattered very much indeed. It meant that a wergeld of 100 head of cattle could be paid in silver at one third of their value. And Charlemagne’s advisers soon found this out. What if a Frisian or a Saxon killed a Frank? Was he to be allowed to escape with a silver payment of one third the value of the cattle? Certainly not; and so, as we have seen in the Capitularies of 781 and 801 enforcing the receipt of the silver solidus of 12d. for all debts, an exception was made of wergelds payable by Saxons and Frisians who killed a Salic Frank. These were still to be paid for, as heretofore, in the solidus of 40d. of the Lex Salica—i.e. the gold solidus of three tremisses.
This, so far as the wergelds were concerned, set the matter right when a Saxon killed a Frank; but it did not set it right in the ordinary case of a Saxon slaying a Saxon.
The wergelds must be divided by three to obtain value in gold solidi.