asking leave, was likewise punished as oberos.

So of personal honour. 'Schelte' or insult, for instance, to call a man
arga, i.e. a lazy loon, is a serious offence. If the defendant will
confess that he said it in a passion, and will take oath that he never
knew the plaintiff to be arga, he must still pay 12_s._; but if he will
stand to his word, then he must fight it out by duel, sub uno scuto.

The person, for the same reason, was sacred. If a man had lain in wait
for a freeman, 'cum virtute et solatio,' with valour and comfort, i.e.
with armed men to back him, and had found him standing or walking simply,
and had shamefully held him, or 'battiderit,' committed assault and
battery on him, he must pay half the man's weregeld; the 'turpiter et
ridiculum' being considered for a freeman as half as bad as death. Here
you find in private life, as well as in public, the vincire et verberare
nefas.

If, again, one had a mind to lose 80 shillings of gold, he need but to
commit the offence of 'meerworphin,' a word which will puzzle you
somewhat, till you find it to signify 'mare warping,' to warp, or throw
one's neighbour off his mare or horse.

A blow with the closed fist, again, costs three shillings: but one with
the open hand, six. The latter is an insult as well as an injury. A
freeman is struck with the fist, but a slave with the palm of the hand.
Breaking a man's head costs six solidi. But if one had broken his skull,
then (as in the Alemannic laws) one must pay twelve shillings, and twelve
more for each fracture up to three--after which they are not counted. But
a piece of bone must come out which will make a sound when thrown into a
shield twelve feet off; which feet are to be measured by that of a man of
middle stature. From which strange law may be deduced, not only the
toughness of the Lombard brain-pan, but the extreme necessity of defining
each particular, in order to prevent subsequent disputes, followed up by
a blood-feud, which might be handed down from father to son. For by
accepting the legal fine, the injured man expressly renounced his
primaeval right of feud.

Then follow some curious laws in favour of the masters of Como, Magistri
Comacenes, who seem to have been a guild of architects, perhaps the
original germ of the great society of free-masons--belonging, no doubt,
to the Roman population--who were settled about the lake of Como, and
were hired, on contract, (as the laws themselves expre