So in Codex I. of Lex Salica, but afterwards owner released from the half-wergeld.
In the Lex Salica the same rule was at first applied to the case of homicide by a slave or læt. A half-wergeld was to be paid and the slave or læt handed over for the other half.[309] This was the rule according to the Codex I. But in the later Codices, VII. to X., and in the ‘Lex Emendata,’ the lord, if innocent, was allowed to get off altogether from the half-wergeld and had only to give up the slave or the læt. This further innovation seems to have been connected with the Edict of Chilperic (circ. A.D. 574) and thus probably represented the result of ecclesiastical influence at very nearly the date of the earliest Kentish laws.
In the Canons of sixth century the slave was to be given up and another besides.
We have only to recur to the Canons of the Celtic Church of Brittany and South Wales of the sixth and seventh centuries, considered in the earlier part of this volume, to recognise the hand of the Church in these innovations upon earlier tribal custom. They extended to Celtic as well as to German districts. In Canon 5 of the so-called ‘Canones Wallici’ the rule was laid down that ‘if any master should permit his slave to carry arms, and the slave killed a freeman, the owner must hand over the slave and another besides’ (supra, p. 108).
The half-wergeld here is omitted altogether, and, as in the case of the Kentish freeman, two slaves are to be given up instead of one.
In the Burgundian Law slave to be given up and the owner to be free.
These Canons were nearly contemporary with the later Kentish laws, and the same stage of innovation seems to have been reached in both. A still further and final stage had been reached in the Burgundian Law already quoted (supra, p. 124) in which in the case of homicide by a slave, unknown to his master, the slave was to be delivered up to death and the master was to be free from liability. The parentes of the slain person were to get nothing, not even the slave, ‘because, as we enact that the guilty shall be extirpated, so we cannot allow the innocent to suffer wrong.’ The whole process of change had taken place in the Burgundian district by the sixth century. But it would seem that in Kent the middle stage only had been reached at the date of the laws of Hlothære and Eadric.
Evidence that the further stage had at last been reached in Anglo-Saxon law is perhaps to be found in the nearly contemporary law of Ine (s. 74) which enacts that if a theow-wealh slay an Englishman, the owner shall deliver him up to the lord and the kindred or give sixty scillings for his life. Here no further manworths are required. But possibly the peculiar position of the theow-wealh may have something to do with it, so that we ought not perhaps to assume as certain that the clause represented a still further general innovation upon tribal custom beyond that described in the Kentish clauses.
Kentish clauses meant to modify the previous rule: which may have been the half-wergeld of 300 and 100 scillings.
Returning to the Kentish clauses and assuming that their direct intention was to modify previous custom, we are now in a position fairly to judge what the previous rule may have been.