citizen of the commonHence the reciprocal defined with the usual

seems to have been taken that no wealth should perish by starvation. duties of alimentor and alimentee are minuteness. An alimentee who was ill treated, or ill fed, might seek redress from the parish authorities, or bring his case before the district Thing. An alimentor who quitted his parish for the purpose of evading his duties, was liable to the punishment of exclusion. No alimentor was allowed to leave the island until he had given his alimentees into the charge of a competent individual, and placed at his disposal sufficient funds to provide, during three years, for their maintenance. We thus find that, in respect to the poor, an Icelandic parish was, to say the least, equally as well managed as an English one. The Icelanders, however, did not charge themselves with the support of their poor without taking especial care to keep the number of paupers within due limits; a care which we have grossly neglected, and are now enduring the fearful consequences of our want of foresight. Hence it was enacted that no one who had not sufficient property to maintain a family should be allowed to marry*, and that when a person manumitted a thrall, he should allot him a piece of land sufficient for the maintenance of a family, failing to do which, he and his heirs should be regarded as the legally bound alimentors of the freedmen and his posterity. Very stringent regulations were also passed to keep the poor within their respective parishes. Clothes and shoes

The minimum is fixed, Sec. viii. 12, at six score legal ounces, that is to say, a property equivalent in value to 720 ells of wadmal, besides clothes and other necessaries. A man whose property was under this legal minimum rendered himself, by marrying, liable to the punishment of exclusion, "except his wife should be barren," an exception quite in accordance with the whole tenor of Icelandic legislation.

The land was not given unconditionally, certain services being required from the donee, at whose death, provided he left no children, it reverted to the donor; otherwise the children inherited, and many hypothetical cases are laid down to show when the heirs of the donor may, in default of issue of the descendants of the donee, again enter into possession of it. This enactment offers a very favourable contrast to a Norwegian law (in the Gulathing code) of the same period, which ordains that the destitute orphans of a manumitted thrall shall be placed in a grave dug for the purpose in the parish churchyard-Norway, was, at this period, a Christian country-and only the child that remained alive the longest be entitled to claim support from his father's former master,

X

might be given to a pauper of another parish, but any parish. ioner who furnished such a pauper with victuals, except he was merely passing through the parish to go to his own, rendered himself liable to the punishment of exclusion. The Icelanders also took care to make able bodied paupers work for their living. An able-bodied pauper found begging was liable to be punished with exile, which, for such a man, was tantamount to death, as he would have no means of leaving the island, and might, consequently, after conviction, be killed with impunity. Begging was not tolerated, especially at the Al-thing. If a beggar entered a booth on the Thingvalla plain, the booth-man might forcibly eject him, and every one who furnished such a beggar with meat, was liable to be punished with exclusion. All persons who wandered about the country for fifteen days and upwards were to be regarded as vagabonds, or ganging-men (göngomenn), as they are termed in the Grágás, and punished accordingly. Besides other punishments to which they were liable, any one who thought proper might mutilate them in the manner practised in the East to qualify a man for the service of the seraglio *.

The Icelandic rural code, as well as the laws for the protection of property, the laws of inheritance, mortgages, and debtor and creditor, are also well deserving of attention, but our limits will only allow us to notice a few of the enactments on these subjects. The legal rate of interest was ten per cent. Insolvent debtors appear to have been very mildly treated, a circumstance that reflects the more credit on the Icelanders from the contrast it affords to the barbarity that prevailed in this respect in Norway, where a debtor was not only obliged to work for his creditor, but if his friends would not liquidate his debts the creditor might lead him to the Thingstead, and there, in the presence of the assembled Thingsmen, "hew off any part of his body, either above or below," that he might think proper, or, in other words, an insolvent debtor whom no one would redeem from thraldom might be legally cut to pieces.

The age for attaining to majority was fixed, for males, at

* Rett er at gelda göngomenn, or as the clause is rendered in Latin-though we should be inclined to substitute vagabundos for mendicos-" Mendicos castrare fas est, nec delicti in leges commissi pœna quis tenetur, etiamsi inde vel plagam vel mortem retulerint."-Grágás v. 35.

sixteen, and for females at eighteen, but a boy when twelve years old was a competent witness, and might enter an action against a person who had killed his father. A person who had arrived at the good old age of fourscore was not allowed to sell his estate, except it was deeply mortgaged, and if he married, any children his wife might have were to be regarded as illegitimate *. Very good regulations were also framed to prevent a person from suffering his land to lie waste. If, after due notice had been given, he refused to cultivate it, or to let it to another willing to do so, his neighbours might make use of it as a common pasture. A person was only allowed to fish or to kill game on his own estate, but he might kill wolves, bears, eagles, and crows anywhere.

The Icelanders did not follow the whale fishery, though they sometimes harpooned a whale that approached the shore, and when one of these leviathans of the deep was stranded or entangled in the ice off the coast, the whole population of the district was in movement, and it was seldom that such an event occurred without giving rise to lawsuits and sanguinary contests. Hence we find in the Grágás no less than eighteen chapters (Sec. ix. ch. 55-72) to define in what manner a legal claim is, in such cases, to be established, and what portion of the spoil has to fall to each of the claimants-to the owner of the land on which the whale was stranded, to the person who first descried it, &c., &c.

At the early period of the commonwealth, when a man was suspected of theft, a kind of tribunal composed of twelve persons named by him, and twelve by the person whose goods had been stolen, was instituted before the door of his dwelling, and hence called a door-doom (duradómr); but as this manner of proceeding generally ended in bloodshed, it was abolished, and an act passed authorizing the suffering party to summon thirty of his neighbours to accompany him for the purpose of making domiciliary visits in search of the stolen property; any one refusing to go, to be fined three marks, and those who would not allow a search to be made on their premises, to be liable to the punishment of exile. This

Grágás, iv. 18. The godord also came within the provisions of this law, which is another proof that it was regarded as real property that might be disposed of whenever the holder thought proper.

act contains as usual numerous regulations respecting the manner in which the search is to be made, and mutual pledges, in the presence of competent witnesses, are to be given that no bodily injury should be inflicted by any of the parties concerned. Highway robbers or brigands might not only be killed with impunity, but those who killed them were entitled to a recompense.

These and numerous other enactments, in the Grágás, as well as the incidents related in the Sagas, show that a man's property was more secure in Iceland than his person. In an age, in fact, when every one went armed, when it was regarded as an act of cowardice to brook the slightest insult, and when a pecuniary compensation might be offered and received without dishonour for a bodily injury, a man's life must have been in daily jeopardy. The same causes would also, in a great measure, have rendered property equally insecure. Hence, although the Icelandic laws both for the protection and inheritance of property are much superior to those of the mother-country, and the Germanic states of the same period, a person skilful in the use of his weapons would, no doubt, frequently have braved their stringent regulations with impunity. This was particularly the case during the times of Paganism, but in the eleventh century legal right appears to have been much more respected. We think, however, that it would be erroneous to suppose, with some writers, that a sudden change of public opinion had been effected by the introduction of Christianity. A change there certainly was, but we should attribute it more to the knowledge of jurisprudence, and especially of judicial forms, which the Icelanders had acquired in the forensic circle of the Al-thing. An influential person had been taught by experience that he might crush his adversary more effectually, and with less bodily risk, by having recourse to legal chicanery, and underhand practices, than by meeting him with sword and battle-axe at a holmgang. In the tenth century a prudent man in Iceland was, no doubt, often deterred from enforcing a legal claim by reflecting on the personal risk he would necessarily incur, and the probability that any step he might take would only be the

• Grágás, viii. 118.

commencement of one of those hereditary feuds that were the cause of so much bloodshed. In the eleventh, and especially in the twelfth and in the thirteenth century, he would be equally deterred by the certain prospect of involving himself and his family in a ruinous and interminable lawsuit. At the early period of the commonwealth the Icelanders acted on the principle-a principle which, as worshippers of Thor, was quite in accordance with their religious tenets-that might constituted right; but the proceedings in their forensic circles gradually effected a great change in their sentiments, and they appear to have finally arrived at the conviction that rights could only be maintained or enforced by legal astute

ness.

CHAPTER III.

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE ICELANDERS.

In our remarks on the Grágás, we purposely abstained from noticing the laws that define conjugal rights and regulate the intercourse between the sexes, it being our intention to give a brief outline of them in the present chapter, together with a few anecdotes from the Sagas, which will serve as their best commentary, and at the same time enable the reader to form a more correct idea of the state of society in Iceland during the earlier period of the commonwealth than any observations we could make on the subject. We should certainly be inclined to doubt whether some of the incidents related in these narratives actually occurred; but the same doubt exists when we read the chronicles of the middle ages or any of the numerous French memoirs of the last three centuries. Yet, where is the age of chivalry portrayed with such vivid colours as in the graphic pages of Froissart? Who presents us with a more truthful picture of the turbulent freedom of a medieval Italian republic than Giovanni Villani? And do not the memoirs of Saint Simon, and the letters of Sévigné, throw & greater light on the social state of France during the reign of Louis XIV. than the most elaborate history? Such kind of works should not be subjected to too severe a criticism. We should be satisfied when the author's statements and opinions,