A Price List for Injuries—and a Way to Stop Feuds
Early medieval law codes could assign different payments to different bodily injuries. A cut or severed finger was not simply counted as “one injury”: the code might distinguish among fingers, while other provisions treated the loss of an ear, eye, or other body part separately. The amount owed therefore depended on the specific harm, not just on the fact that someone had been hurt.
These payments belonged to a broader practice often called composition: compensation paid to an injured person or their family in place of continued retaliation. For a fatal injury, a related system known as wergild set compensation for a person’s death. The rules varied among communities and codes; there was no single ratebook shared by all medieval Germanic peoples.
Why Such Exact Distinctions Mattered
A detailed tariff gave both sides a public starting point for settling a dispute. Without an agreed payment, an injury could trigger a cycle of revenge between families. A written rule made the consequence more predictable: identify the injury, consult the relevant provision, and determine what compensation was due.
The distinctions also show that the law treated bodily harm as more than a generic loss. A body part’s usefulness and the injury’s seriousness could affect its assigned value. The code did not make every person’s suffering equal in modern terms; status and local rules could shape what was owed. But its precision made the system usable in a tense, practical moment—when a damaged hand or missing ear might otherwise become the beginning of a feud.
