| The three bauga payments of near relatives, with addition of women’s gifts | 20 | marks | or | 64 | cows. | |
| The upnám payments within descendants of paternal and maternal great-grandparents | 10 | marks | 2 ores | or | 32⅘ | cows. |
| 30 | marks | 2 ores | or | 96⅘ | cows. |
As in the Frostathing law the nefgildi-men took as a group an amount equal to one half the amount of the bauga group, so here the upnám men do the same. Evidently this is the intention.
Wergeld of the hauld at 1:8 200 gold solidi, or roundly, 100 cows.
Now if we may take the bauga payments and the upnám payments as representing in intention 30 silver marks or 96 cows, then, at a ratio of 1:8, the 30 silver marks equalled, in wheat-grains, exactly 200 Merovingian gold solidi.[181] And this may have been the ancient wergeld of the hauld.
There is, however, in clause 235 a further payment mentioned extending ‘to the fifteenth degree of kinship’ and amounting to about 1 mark and 3 ores. Possibly (though I hardly think it likely) this formed a part of the original wergeld, and if it be added, it would increase the wergeld to 31 marks, 5 ores, and at 2½ ores to the cow the wergeld would be increased to 101⅕ cows. If we might take this as roughly aiming at the round number of 32 marks and 100 cows, the wergeld of the hauld would be, at the ratio of 1:8, four gold marks or 100 cows: i.e. in actual weight the heavy gold mina of 32 Roman ounces, which under Greek usage was divided into 100 staters or ox-units. The confusion between 96 and 100 cows is so likely a result of the application of Roman methods to the division of the mina that we need not regard it. That the one or the other of these amounts may have been the original wergeld of the hauld representing originally 100 cows is consistent at least with widely spread tribal usage.
This view is confirmed by the fact that the further payments mentioned in the Gulathing are distinctly abnormal ones, and so presumably added at a later date like those mentioned in the Frostathing law.
We are justified in so considering them, because in the laws themselves the persons to whom they were made are expressly called Sak-aukar, or ‘additional persons in the sak or suit.’ And when we examine them further we find that they were hardly likely to have been included among the original recipients of the wergeld.
Among those of clause 236 are the thrallborn brother and thrallborn son of the slain, and the half-brother by the same mother; and clause 239 extends the number to the son-in-law, brother-in-law, stepfather, stepson, oath brothers, and foster brothers. Evidently in these exceptional cases the rules of strict blood relationship have been broken away from, and additions have been made to the normal wergeld to stay the vengeance of persons sufficiently nearly connected in other ways to make them dangerous if left unappeased.
It was probably these additional payments, added from time to time in contravention of the strict rules of blood relationship, which caused the uncertainty of the later laws, and led to the new system of awarding a round number of gold marks as the total wergeld, included in which were additions intended to meet the introduction of half-blood and foster relations and others the risk of whose vengeance it seemed needful apparently in later times to buy off.