‘An Image of Deadly Feud’

Chapter 3 turns to the history of private satisfaction-seeking, or feuding, and focuses on compensation for homicide. It shows that payments continued longer than we might have thought. When such compensation served as a means to bypass legal sanctions, it hindered the successful imposition of the king’s peace, let alone any emerging notion of a public peace. Mediated through the ancient mechanism of the appeal, however, compensation continued into the sixteenth century and beyond, thanks in part to the needs and actions of victims’ widows. But appeals did decline over the early modern period. Here, too, a statute of 1487 played a part, as did the uses judges made of the new manslaughter verdict. Judges and others derided appeals as ‘suits of revenge’, tainted by association with the feud and an approach to peace-making and satisfaction-seeking that had less and less legitimacy as public justice came to supersede private interests.