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ENGLAND - Freedom, loyalty and pagan values
The pagan world exalted physical courage, personal freedom and economic independence, but especially loyalty to one’s family, or kin, or leader. Loyalty to the kindred may be considered as a form of primitive mutual protection. A man’s kindred included hisremoter cousins and, since marriage had to be with a partner outside the kindred, a wronged wife would call on her own kindred to right her wrongs or to care for her children if she was widowed. It was the duty of the kin to avenge the killing of any of its members. This meant that the murder of one man by another could be the beginning of a blood feud or vendetta involving the kindred of both the murderer and his victim. Since this would be destructive of social order, in Anglo-Saxon society it quickly became custumary to substitute, for the killing of the guilty parts, an axaction of compensation in kind of money, called wergeld. In time, wergeld came to signify not so much what a man was worth in case of death, but his status while he was alive. A man’s loyalty to his lord was originally a matter for military discipline. Much Anglo-Saxon epic poetry promotes the idea that a man should fight to the death for his lord if necessary.
Although it is widely known that both the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons were fierce and brave peoples, it is not generally realized that they had a highly developed sense of beauty. They made fine ornaments and beautiful jewellery. They were also very sophisticated in the arts of speech. They enjoyed expressing their ideas in an original, often rather suble way. They valued understatement and liked riddles and kennings, their highly developed oraltradition testified that they were in fact a more artistic and poetic people than their Norman conquerors, who were essentially soldiers and administrator.
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