Among the English, as among all the races of mankind, justice had originally sprung from each man’s personal action.  There had been a time when every freeman was his own avenger.  But even in the earliest forms of English society of which we find traces this right of self-defence was being modified and restricted by a growing sense of public justice.  The “blood-wite” or compensation in money for personal wrong was the first effort of the tribe as a whole to regulate private revenge.  The freeman’s life and the freeman’s limb had each on this system its legal price.  “Eye for eye,” ran the rough code, and “life for life,” or for each fair damages.  We see a further step towards the modern recognition of a wrong as done not to the individual man but to the people at large in another custom of early date.  The price of life or limb was paid, not by the wrong-doer to the man he wronged, but by the family or house of the wrong-doer to the family or house of the wronged.  Order and law were thus made to rest in each little group of people upon the blood-bond which knit its families together; every outrage was held to have been done by all who were linked in blood to the doer of it, every crime to have been done against all who were linked in blood to the sufferer from it.  From this sense of the value of the family bond as a means of restraining the wrong-doer by forces which the tribe as a whole did not as yet possess sprang the first rude forms of English justice.  Each kinsman was his kinsman’s keeper, bound to protect him from wrong, to hinder him from wrong-doing, and to suffer with him and pay for him if wrong were done.  So fully was this principle recognized that even if any man was charged before his fellow-tribesmen with crime his kinsfolk still remained in fact his sole judges; for it was by their solemn oath of his innocence or his guilt that he had to stand or fall.

[Sidenote:  The Land]

As the blood-bond gave its first form to English justice, so it gave their first forms to English society and English warfare.  Kinsmen fought side by side in the hour of battle, and the feelings of honour and discipline which held the host together were drawn from the common duty of every man in each little group of warriors to his house.  And as they fought side by side on the field, so they dwelled side by side on the soil.  Harling abode by Harling, and Billing by Billing; and each “wick” or “ham” or “stead” or “tun” took its name from the kinsmen who dwelled together in it.  In this way the home or “ham” of the Billings was Billingham, and the “tun” or township of the Harlings was Harlington.  But in such settlements the tie of blood was widened into the larger tie of land.  Land with the German race seems at a very early time to have become everywhere the accompaniment of full freedom.  The freeman was strictly the free-holder, and the exercise of his full rights as a free member of the community to which he belonged became inseparable from the possession