Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

HONOR AND DEGRADATION 17 3
sacrosanct. What was so unusual about Celtic systems-and the Irish
one went further with this than any other-was that honor could be
precisely quantified. Every free person had his or her "honor price": the
price that one had to pay for an insult to the person's dignity. These
varied. The honor price of a king, for instance, was seven cumal, or
seven slave girls-this was the standard honor price for any sacred being,
the same as a bishop or master poet. Since (as all sources hasten to
point out) slave girls were not normally paid as such, this would mean,
in the case of an insult to such a person's dignity, one would have to
pay twenty-one milk cows or twenty-one ounces of silver.20 The honor
price of a wealthy peasant was two and a half cows, of a minor lord,
that, plus half a cow additionally for each of his free dependents-and
since a lord, to remain a lord, had to have at least five of these, that
brought him up to at least five cows total.21
Honor price is not to be confused with wergeld-the actual price
of a man or woman's life. If one killed a man, one paid goods to the
value of seven cumals, in recompense for killing him, to which one
then added his honor price, for having offended against his dignity (by
killing him). Interestingly, only in the case of a king are the blood price
and his honor price the same.
There were also payments for injury: if one wounds a man's cheek,
one pays his honor price plus the price of the injury. (A blow to the
face was, for obvious reasons, particularly egregious.) The problem
was how to calculate the injury, since this varied according to both
the physical damage and status of the injured party. Here, Irish jurists
developed the ingenious expedient of measuring different wounds with
different varieties of grain: a cut on the king's cheek was measured in
grains of wheat, on that of a substantial farmer in oats, on that of a
smallholder merely in peas. One cow was paid for each.U Similarly,
if one stole, say, a man's brooch or pig, one had to pay back three
brooches or three pigs-plus his honor price, for having violated the
sanctity of his homestead. Attacking a peasant under the protection of
a lord was the same as raping a man's wife or daughter, a violation
of the honor not of the victim, but of the man who should have been
able to protect them.
Finally, one had to pay the honor price if one simply insulted
someone of any importance: say, by turning the person away at a feast,
inventing a particularly embarrassing nickname (at least, if it caught
on), or humiliating the person through the use of satire.23 Mockery
was a refined art in Medieval Ireland, and poets were considered close
to magicians: it was said that a talented satirist could rhyme rats to
death, or at the very least, raise blisters on the faces of victims. Any