Absolutely. But there were very elaborate laws about bloodtaking. According to William Ian Miller, the leading scholar in English on the subject, the Lawspeaker at the Allthing (the all-Iceland court/legislature/town meting) spent three full days reciting the laws at every meeting and the written code was quite hefty. There were, however, no state authorities to enforce these laws, hence the hatchet in the skull as a matter of self-help. It's hard to believe that medieval Iceland was more sanguinary than England or France of the same period, with their state-backed laws mandating death for nearly every breach of the peace and any property crime of any gravity,
--- Andy F <andy274 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/28/07, andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > No kidding your experiences with courts have been
> > negative. Even if everything else was perfect,
> > whatever that means, litigation occurs because
> people
> > have disputes so serious they cannot resolve them
> > without recourse to invoking the power of the
> state
> > (or anyway, as in medieval Iceland, the
> community).
>
> Judging from The Saga of Burnt Njall, litigation in
> medieval Iceland
> involved invoking the power of burying the hatchet
> in a skull.
>
>
> --
> Andy
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>
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