The new law breaks away altogether from old tribal traditions, and an attempt is made to treat homicide from the new point of view of reason and justice as between one individual and another, with but little, if any, regard to kindred.
The traditional value of animals.
From the law against theft we get a scale for the equation of cattle &c. with gold. If a Burgundian or Roman ‘ingenuus’ steals away a slave, horse, mare, ox, or cow, he is to lose his life, unless he takes refuge in a church, and from the property of the criminal the price of the stolen animal is, ‘in simplum,’ to be paid to the person robbed, unless the thing stolen can be found and restored—i.e.:
| For the slave | 25 | solidi |
| For ‘best horse’ | 10 | ” |
| For moderate horse | 5 | ” |
| For mare | 3 | ” |
| For ox | 2 | ” |
| For cow | 1 | solidus. |
Thus from these traditional values, retained even under new circumstances by the Burgundian law, we learn that the wergeld of the middle class of freemen, ‘mediocres in populo,’ of 200 solidi, was still regarded as the equivalent of 100 oxen or 200 cows.
There is no doubt in this case that the solidi were those of the Imperial standard. The Burgundian Kingdom was destroyed by the Franks in A.D. 534—i.e. before the issue by Merovingian princes of solidi and trientes of the Merovingian standard.
II. THE WERGELDS OF THE LEX WISIGOTHORUM.
The laws of the Wisigoths are too Roman to be taken as evidence of what may have been the ancient tribal wergelds of the Goths.
The tribal polity of the Goths broken up by Roman influences.