If any cleric kills his neighbour he must undergo ten years’ banishment with seven years’ penance. If after ten years he has acted rightly and is approved by the testimony of the abbot or priest, let him be received back into his country and let him satisfy the friends of him whom he has killed. Let him return to the father or mother (of the slain), if alive, saying ‘Behold I, as for your son, will do whatsoever you tell me.’ If he does not rightly do this he is not to be received—‘in eternum.’
Then in s. 53 is added, ‘If any one will propose better rules we will accept and follow them.’
To sum up the evidence of the canons, we can hardly claim to have done more than to have connected the coirp-dire of the Brehon Laws with the pretium hominis of St. Patrick, and with the pretium sanguinis of the ‘Canones Hibernenses,’ and with the clauses relating to homicide excerpted by the compiler of the so-called ‘Canones Wallici’ from the books of the Romans and Franks.
The connection, though traceable only through ecclesiastical channels, seems to establish a continuity as regards the fixed payment for homicide between the Breton and Irish churches, and possibly the churches of the Goidelic portion of South Wales, of the fifth and sixth centuries.
Continuity of Irish and Breton custom as regards the ‘pretium hominis’ and payment in ancillæ.
If it were suggested that the pretium hominis of seven ancillæ might be an ecclesiastical invention originating with the missionary churches of the Armorican districts of Gaul, we should still have to inquire why these churches differed so much from other Gallic churches. Everywhere else the Church, finding it impossible to get rid of a deep-rooted custom, seems to have made compacts with the secular power, adopting the customary system of wergelds prevalent in each of the conquered and converted tribes, and giving to the several grades in the ecclesiastical hierarchy graduated wergelds placing them on a level with corresponding classes of tribesmen or laymen. Even in these Celtic Canons the clerical instinct, whilst apparently adopting the fixed wergeld or coirp-dire for laymen, claimed for the clergy a graduated wergeld.
The bishop, as we have seen according to the canons, claimed a sevenfold pretium hominis—seven times the price of seven ancillæ—because of his rank in the clerical hierarchy. He claimed too the honour-price of seven ancillæ—the same as that of the Irish chieftain of a district for breach of his protection or precinct. The bishop seems to place himself here as elsewhere in these matters, on a level with the secular prince or even with the king.
And again, if St. Patrick in his ‘Confessions’ (a work the authenticity of which is generally accepted) could use, as he did, the pretium hominis as a well-known unit of payment, it would seem that at least as early as the end of the fifth century the value of the pretium hominis as a unit of payment was perfectly well understood. And this in itself is a proof of further antiquity.
The redeeming of baptized captives from slavery was moreover a recognised method of increasing the number of converts to the Christian Faith. In his equally authentic Epistle to the subjects of Coroticus St. Patrick speaks of the Roman and Gallic custom of Christians to send holy and fit men to the Franks and other nations with so many thousands of solidi for redeeming baptized captives, while Coroticus was killing and selling captives to a foreign people ignorant of God. Mr. Whitley Stokes, in editing this letter, suggests that this passage points to a date before the conversion of the Franks (A.D. 496).[92] The traffic in captives and slaves, and their sale perhaps into a still pagan corner of France, accords with the strangely local use of the ancilla as the unit of payment as well in the Canons as in the Brehon Laws.
What, then, are we to make of this fixed wergeld of seven ancillæ? So far, we find it prevalent only in Ireland and in the Goidelic or non-Cymric districts of South Wales and Brittany. And the evidence seems to carry it back to the fifth century.