Reasoning from the analogy of other laws, it seems most likely to have been to make the owner pay a half-wergeld of the person slain and hand over the esne for the other half—the stage of custom reached in the Ripuarian Laws and Salic Laws of Codex I.
And if this were in fact the former custom previous to the enactment in these clauses, then without departing from the correct literal reading of the text it may be that the words in the parenthesis in each clause may refer, not to the eorlcundman’s or the freeman’s wergild—the word ‘leod-geldi’ is not used—but to the amount hitherto payable in the particular case of a man slain by an esne. The 300 and 100 scillings may be the half-wergeld hitherto payable, instead of which thenceforth the owner of the esne is to pay three manworths or one manworth in addition to handing over the esne.
If previous to the innovation the eorlcundman had been paid for in such a case with three hundred shillings and the freeman with one hundred, the words in their strictly correct literal meaning might perhaps rightly be read thus:—
If any one’s esne slay an eorlcundman, one who is [now] paid for at three hundred scillings, let the owner [in future] give up the slayer and add three manworths [of the esne] thereto.
If anyone’s esne slay a freeman, one who is [now] paid for at one hundred scillings, let the owner [in future] give up the slayer and add one manworth [of the esne] thereto.
This reading of the clauses, putting emphasis upon what is now the gild (þane ꝥ sie)—the three and the one hundred scillings—in contrast with what the owner has in future to do, i.e. pay three manworths and one manworth instead of the three hundred and one hundred scillings in addition to the handing over of the esne—seems to me more than any other rendering to account for the insertion of the parenthesis stating the amounts payable for the eorlcundman and freeman. If the word leod-gylde had been used it might have been different. But I am informed on the best authority that the words gylde and gelde in the two clauses are not substantives but used in an adjectival sense, and in this case they would apply to a half-wergeld payable as correctly as to a whole one.
Was 100 scillings the half-wergeld and so the medume wergeld of King Ethelbert’s laws?
At the same time the mention of 100 scillings, if the payment be a half-wergeld, may help to an understanding of the medume leodgeld of 100 scillings mentioned in Ethelbert’s Laws. It suggests that the medume wergeld was a modified or middle one which, like the medium werigeldum and medium precium of the mediæval Latin of the Alamannic and other laws, had come to mean a half one. Perhaps, after all, if we recognise clerical influence in the framing and modification of the Kentish laws, the translation of the Latin ‘medium werigeldum’ by the Anglo-Saxon ‘medume leodgeld’ is not very unnatural.
Before we leave the laws of Hlothære and Eadric there are one or two further clauses worth notice.
System of oath-helpers.