Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

HONOR AND DEGRADATION 17 5
her father and thus became its guardian. What about serfs The same
principle applied: when a lord acquired a serf, he bought out that
man's honor price, presenting him with its equivalent in cows. From
that moment on, if anyone insulted or injured the serf, it was seen an
attack on the lord's honor, and it was up to the lord to collect the attendant
fees. Meanwhile the lord's honor price was notched upward
as a result of gathering another dependent: in other words, he literally
absorbs his new vassal's honor into his own.26
All this, in turn, makes it possible to understand both something
of the nature of honor, and why slave girls were kept as units for
reckoning debts of honor even at a time when-owing no doubt to
church influence-they no longer actually changed hands. At first sight
it might seem strange that the honor of a nobleman or king should be
measured in slaves, since slaves were human beings whose honor was
zero. But if one's honor is ultimately founded on one's ability to extract
the honor of others, it makes perfect sense. The value of a slave is that
of the honor that has been extracted from them.
Sometimes, one comes on a single haphazard detail that gives the
game away. In this case it comes not from Ireland but from the Dimetian
Code in Wales, written somewhat later but operating on much
the same principles. At one point, after listing the honors due to the
seven holy sees of the Kingdom of Dyfed, whose bishops and abbots
were the most exalted and sacred creatures in the kingdom, the text
specifies that
Whoever draws blood from an abbot of any one of those principal
seats before mentioned, let him pay seven pounds; and a
female of his kindred to be a washerwoman, as a disgrace to
the kindred, and to serve as a memorial to the payment of the
honor priceY
A washerwoman was the lowest of servants, and the one turned
over in this case was to serve for life. She was, in effect, reduced to
slavery. Her permanent disgrace was the restoration of the abbot's
honor. While we cannot know if some similar institution once lay behind
the habit of reckoning the honor of Irish "sacred" beings in slavewomen,
the principle is clearly the same. Honor is a zero-sum game. A
man's ability to protect the women of his family is an essential part of
that honor. Therefore, forcing him to surrender a woman of his family
to perform menial and degrading chores in another's household is the
ultimate blow to his honor. This, in turn, makes it the ultimate reaffirmation
of the honor of he who takes it away.