unless dignity of birth or nobility of kindred demand a greater precium.
For it is not just that service in a holy profession in a higher grade should lose what secular life in lay dress may be recognised to have by right of parentage.
The wergelds here stated for the clergy are stated in sicli and argentei. The Roman argenteus, as we have seen (after Nero’s time), was the drachma of silver, and the siclus was a didrachma or quarter of an ounce. The Archbishop, therefore, was claiming 200 ounces of silver as the wergeld of his Northumbrian priest.
Stated in Roman silver currency.
Whether he knew it or not, this amounted in value to 4000 sceatts (of 20 to the ounce), i.e. 800 Wessex and 1000 Mercian scillings. So that in claiming for his priest a wergeld of 200 ounces of silver he does not seem to have had in his mind either the Mercian or the Wessex twelve-hyndeman’s wergeld, of 1200 scillings, of 5 or 4 sceatts, but, possibly, as we shall see, a Kentish wergeld of 200 Kentish scillings of 20 sceatts.
Priest’s wergeld to be 200 Roman ounces of silver.
The Archbishop’s claim falling short of what was ultimately granted in Northumbria is curious as showing that Northumbrian law, at this time, before the inroads of the Norse invaders, was still unsettled, and that the Archbishop may have been influenced by Kentish rather than by West-Saxon or Mercian precedents. It was after another century, and after the Norse invasion and conquest, that the wergelds of the mass-thane and secular-thane in the ‘North People’s Law’ were stated to be alike at 2000 thrymsas, or 1200 Wessex shillings. How much earlier the equation was made in Northumbria we know not.
The next clause to be noticed is that in reply to question viii., viz. ‘If any monks shall mix themselves up with sacrilege, should you now prosecute, if the avengement of the crime pertains to laymen who are their relations?’
The reply is as follows:—