Beyond this there is not much more to be gathered concerning the gradations in social rank. Nor are we told anything about the division of the amount among the members of the kindred receiving or paying the cro as the case might be. We are told only that the cro and galnes belonged to the kin of the person slain.
Turning from the cro and galnes to the kelchin: what are we to make of it?
The kelchin like the Welsh saraad for insult.
The gradations resemble those of the cro to this extent, that the kelchin of each grade was one third less than that of the one above, but the kelchin was no direct fraction of the cro. The kelchin seems, as we have said, to be something like the Welsh saraad for insult or wounding, the Irish enec-lann or honour-price, and the Norse rett or ‘personal right;’ but it does not seem to correspond altogether with any one of them.
All we know is that on the homicide of a person, whoever he might be, in addition to the cro and galnes, the kelchin had to be paid. But it was a payment which, like the Cymric saraad, according to the interesting explanation given, did not go with the wergeld proper to the kindred or relations in blood. When a wife was slain, the husband, who was not a blood relation or of the kindred of the wife, took the kelchin, while the wergeld proper—cro and galnes—went to her kindred.
Each grade had a precinct and a fine for breach of it. But not the carl or rustic.
Turning to the payment which had to be made for breach of the peace or protection of the lord, it was a payment due to the king if the homicide were perpetrated ‘in pace regis,’ and to a person of each grade in succession, even to the thane’s grandson, in case the homicide were committed within his precinct. Only the carl or rustic received no payment, as presumably he was living on the land of a lord, who would, therefore, claim it.
The position of the carl or rustic, or in Norman French the vilein, is interesting. If his wife was killed the lord took the kelchin. The homicide was reckoned as an insult and loss to him. The wergeld did not go to the husband but to the kindred of the wife, as in the case of those of higher grade. So that, so far as this at least, there was recognition of kindred in the rustic’s position. His ‘cro and galnes’ was just about one sixth of that of the thane and presumably went to his kin—as his wife’s cro and galnes went to her kin.
There is one other point as yet unexplained—what was the ‘turhochret’?
It occurs in the clause:—