Gif hwa ham socne ge wyrce ge bete ꝥ mid .v. pundan. þam cingce on engla lage ⁊ on cent æt ham socne v. þam cingce ⁊ þreo þam arce bisceope ⁊ dena lage swa hit ærsteod ⁊ gif hine mon þær afylle licge ægilde.
If anyone commit hamsocn let him make bot for it with v pounds to the King by English law, and in Kent from hamsocn v to the King and three to the archbishop and by Danish law as it formerly stood, and if he there be killed let him lie unpaid for.
It is not very clear what the ham-socn was. In the Latin versions it is translated by ‘invasio domi.’ And it seems to be the same thing as the ‘heimsókn’ of the Norse laws.[295] It seems to be a breach of the peace within the sacred precinct of the ‘heim,’ and the penalty seems to place it on the same ground as the borh-bryce and mund-byrd of the king so as to have become in Cnut’s time one of the crimes which in Kent also involved a penalty of fifty Kentish scillings.[296]
Here, then, the inference again is that fifty Kentish scillings were equal in Cnut’s time to five pounds of silver.
It is quite true that these two statements of Kentish law are not found in the other manuscripts of Cnut’s laws, so that in one sense they may be regarded as interpolations, but in the MS. G they are not insertions made afterwards. In both passages the words form an integral part of the text, which throughout is written in a clear and excellent hand.
It is difficult to suggest any reason for the insertion of these two statements of Kentish law other than the deliberate intention to point out that the amount of the Kentish king’s mund-byrd of fifty Kentish scillings was the same as the Wessex mund-byrd of five pounds of silver.
In addition, therefore, to the fact that at a ratio of 1:12 between gold and silver the two amounts were alike, these passages seem to show that the penalty of fifty Kentish scillings had become permanently recognised in Cnut’s time as equal to the English penalty of five pounds of silver.[297]
If the comparison had been made throughout in silver sceatts, the equation would not have held good so exactly, for 1000 sceatts would not have equalled exactly five pounds, i.e. 1200 of the same sceatts. The exact equation seems to have been between fifty Kentish gold scillings of two tremisses, and five pounds of silver at the current Frankish ratio of 1:12. So that the direct evidence of these passages from Cnut’s laws goes very far to verify the hypothesis derived from numismatic considerations that the scilling of the Kentish laws was a gold scilling of two tremisses, like that of the Continental Saxons and North-East Frisians.
Scætts cannot have been farthings.