Leges inter Brettos et Scottos

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The Leges inter Brettos et Scottos or Laws of the Brets and Scots is the name given to a High Medieval legal tract.

The name is probably incorrect and is believed to have referred instead to a now-lost tract regulating disputes between Britons and Scots in the lands of the former kingdom of Strathclyde. The laws survive in a 13th century Anglo-Norman translation. Likely of 11th century origins, the laws were suppressed by Edward I of England in 1305, most probably because they were contrary to the basic concepts of English law of the time.

The laws set out the scale of payments to be made in compensation for homicides, woundings, and assaults, called cro, a term derived from the Classical Gaelic cró of Early Irish law. The payments began with the sixteen cattle paid for the death of a peasant, through the hundred payable for the death of a thane, to the thousand required to settle the death of a king.

Frederic Seebohm used the laws in his comparative study of wergild, Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law (1902), and they have been used by modern historians to analyse the Society of Scotland in the High Middle Ages.

The later Scots law concepts of assythment and the letter of Slains may perhaps be related.

[edit] References

• Kelly, Fergus (1988), A Guide to Early Irish Law, vol. IV, Early Irish Law Series, Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, ISBN 0-901282-95-2 
• Sellar, W. D. H. (2001), “laws and institutions, Gaelic”, in Lynch, Michael, Oxford Companion to Scottish History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 381–382, ISBN 0-19-211696-7 
• Woolf, Alex (2007), From Pictland to Alba, 789–1070, The New Edinburgh History of Scotland, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 346–349, ISBN 0-7486-1234-5