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– perhaps by offering shelter or food – were subject to the same punishment. The Icelandic law code, Grágás , provided for similar consequences, equating the status of the newly outlawed to that of a wolf: ‘hann skal sva vida vargr heita, sem vidast er verold byggd, ok vera hvarvetna raekr ok rekinn um allan heim’ [‘he shall be known as a wolf, as widely as the world is inhabited, and be rejected everywhere and be driven away throughout all the world’] (Barraclough 2010 ). The use of animalistic metaphors to communicate the status of the outlaw is significant and
dimensions: values and principles on the one hand, and formal procedures and institutions on the other. The former propagate the basic ethos of a country’s public life, mainly through their declaratory, aspirational and socialising impact rather than through legal force. The latter explain what the principles mean for particular office-holders, and define and enforce precise rules of behaviour through soft-law codes, managerial discipline or hard law. Values and principles. In regulating ethics there is clearly a need for both values and principles and for rules and
government in an environment where levels of trust and support and electoral participation are already low. The chosen tools were soft law, codes of conduct, and a para-legal framework with consequences for poor behaviour, but not penal ones. The arrangements proved overly complex and had to be rapidly reviewed. Key decisional processes were repatriated to the local level, notwithstanding the government’s fear that this could thwart the effectiveness of the entire process. Moreover, the values of the system, when revealed in detail exposed publicly what hitherto was
blatantly disregarding the official propaganda. TPA_003.indd 89 4/6/2011 2:27:26 PM 90 - , 1933–38 By the middle of May, the newspaper’s hostile outbursts at the government resulted in four confiscations in swift succession. The edition on 5 May was confiscated following the publication of an article about the government’s ban on uniforms, which amounted to incitement according to Paragraph 300 of the penal law code. Five days later, the newspaper was confiscated a second time for a scathing article about the Austrian public service
being remitted to the beneficiary of the privilege of immunity, and this seems to be what lay behind the grant of judicial rights to the immunist. Chief amongst these was the right to collect the fretum . This was a proportion (usually said to be one-third) of the composition fine paid to the ruler or to his or her representative the count for arranging the peace between a victim of a ‘crime’ and its perpetrator. Such compensation arrangements, the stuff of the law codes, were always expressed in cash amounts, as were other sorts of fine, such as the fine for
because people’s multi-faceted identities were intertwined with material things, visual experiences, spaces and landscapes (Gosden, 2005 ). Moreover, objects are part of how people define themselves and each other, and are central to how people interact. How a person looks will influence how someone responds to them within a specific cultural setting, because objects are situated intermediately in relationships and act as fulcrums for interpersonal interactions. The aesthetic of relationships reinforces perception – for example, some of the earliest law codes
stria who is proven to have eaten a man is liable to a fine of 8000 denarii.7 In later law codes, it was rather the belief in such creatures that was more often condemned, with women who were accused of being monstrous witches frequently entitled to compensation. The continuing presence of such laws testifies to the durability of the belief that certain women could be strigae in fact, as do similar entries in early-medieval penitentials and the later exempla of preachers, and this popular belief existed side by side with the educated, clerical position approved by the
though she may be, Grendel’s mother is nevertheless demonstrating that she knows the rules of this game. According to Leslie Lockett, extant Anglo-Saxon law codes ‘do not prescribe the display of corpses, but they do preserve the distinction between the legitimate killing of an offender and secret murder’. Lockett notes that whereas Grendel’s killings are without just cause and are therefore kept concealed, his mother’s ‘slaying of Æschere is –at least from her perspective –a legitimate requital of her own son’s death, for which reason she prominently displays the
Moses by the Lord (Exodus 20), was the birth of constitutionalism (Finer 1997). For the first time in history, a polity established the principle that the power of the king, or ruler, was restricted by a higher law. As a political historian has observed ‘the monarch [was] bound by an explicit and written law code imposed upon him, coequally with his subjects, from the outside’ (Finer 1997: 239, italics in the original). In introducing this doctrine, the Jews established, before anyone else – and at a time when unrestricted despotism was the order of the day – the
twelve-mile radius) was accorded special treatment and gave rise to a special jurisdiction (and his personal protection). 17 The king’s personal authority and his particular geographical location thus continued to be a significant focus for the exercise of justice. When it came to legislation, the law-codes attributed to the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman kings offered an example of the king’s apparent lead