The Bone-Breaker’s Price List: The Brutal 7th-Century Origin of Personal Injury Claims

Before personal injury lawyers, compensation calculators and no win, no fee ads, there was a king who solved violence with… a spreadsheet of pain.

Around 602 AD, King Æthelberht of Kent looked at a world of blood feuds and revenge killings and realised something simple:
if everyone kept stabbing each other over insults, there’d be no one left to farm, fight or pay tax.

His fix was not prisons or police. It was money.

He issued the Law of Æthelberht, the earliest written English law code – and turned every broken rib, missing finger and shattered jaw into a fixed debt, payable in shillings instead of blood.

Lose a front tooth? That’s 6 shillings.
Lose a thumb? 20 shillings.
Break a thigh? 12 shillings.

It is grimly funny and weirdly familiar: an early personal injury law system, long before anyone said “general damages” or “legal settlement”.

Opening folio of the Law of Æthelberht in the Textus Roffensis, showing Anglo-Saxon legal text about compensation and wergild.

What was the first personal injury law?

The earliest written personal injury laws in England appear in the Code of Æthelberht of Kent (c. 602 AD). The code sets out “bot” (compensation) and wergild (man-price), assigning specific cash values to injuries and deaths to stop blood feuds and offer a legal remedy instead of revenge.

The Body Price: Wergild and Your Built-In Value

At the core of Anglo-Saxon compensation law sits one cold idea: every person has a price tag.

This was called wergild – literally “man-price.” It was the sum you (or your family) had to pay if you killed or seriously injured someone.

In Æthelberht’s Kent:

A typical free man’s wergild was set at 100 shillings.
Higher-status people and royal dependants had higher prices.
Slaves did not have wergild; you paid their market value to their owner.

If you killed someone, you didn’t “go to prison” – there were no real prisons. You owed a life-sized debt:

A portion to the victim’s family (their man-price).
Often a separate fine to the king for disturbing the peace.

Wergild is the ancestor of:

Wrongful death compensation
Life insurance thinking (putting a financial value on a life)
The idea that you can swap blood revenge for money damages

It’s also a reminder that from the very beginning, law, money and bodies were tightly tangled. If you like the idea of money being attached to human bodies, you’ll love how it comes back again in the 18th century. In our article on the morbid origins of life insurance and insurance law, strangers literally took out policies on other people’s deaths as a kind of financial blood money.

The medieval manuscript Textus Roffensis open to a page of early English law codes compiled in the 12th century.

The Shopping List of Pain: What Each Injury Was “Worth”

Æthelberht’s law code reads at times like a grim Argos catalogue of injury. It itemises specific body parts and slaps a fixed compensation figure on each.

Here are some of the stand-outs:

Front teeth: 6 shillings each
Next tooth along: 4 shillings
The one beside that: 3 shillings
All the others: 1 shilling each
Breaking the jawbone: 20 shillings
Damaging speech: 12 shillings
Piercing the nose: 9 shillings
Gashing the nose: 6 shillings per cut
Piercing a cheek: 3 shillings (both cheeks: 6)
Deafening an ear: 25 shillings
Cutting an ear off: 12 shillings
Piercing an ear: 3 shillings
Gashing an ear: 6 shillings
Striking off a thumb: 20 shillings
Forefinger (the “shooting finger”): 9 shillings
Middle finger: 4 shillings
Ring finger (“gold-finger”): 6 shillings
Little finger: 11 shillings
Breaking a thigh: 12 shillings
Broken rib: 3 shillings
Foot cut off: 50 shillings

It’s brutally logical and strangely petty at the same time:

Your thumb is worth the same as a broken jaw: 20 shillings.
Your little finger is worth more than your middle finger – apparently, pinkies mattered.
A front tooth costs more than other teeth, because it affects your smile and public face – a tiny glimpse of early ideas about appearance and social damage, a kind of proto-general damages for embarrassment.

You can almost imagine two farmers arguing:

“You smashed my front tooth – that’s 6 shillings, not 1. I checked the king’s list.”

Blood Feud or Payout: Why This Looked Like Progress

To us, this tariff of human parts looks cold. To a 7th-century villager, it looked like peacekeeping technology.

Before written codes like Æthelberht’s, disputes could spiral into blood feuds that lasted generations. One insult, one punch, one killing – and suddenly two extended families were hunting each other.

Æthelberht’s approach:

Defines bot – compensation – for specific acts.
Makes it normal to settle violence with money instead of more violence.
Ties it to the king’s authority: pay up, or you’re not just offending your neighbour, you’re offending the monarchy.

In modern language, this is early personal injury law:

The victim is recognised as someone who deserves compensation.
The harm is converted into a legal debt, not just a private grudge.
The king is effectively regulating personal injury claims to stabilise society.

Early medieval Anglo-Saxon great square-headed brooch with intricate animal ornament, similar to high-status jewellery from 6th-century graves.

Debt Collectors with Swords: What If You Couldn’t Pay?

Here’s where it stops sounding like a neat compensation system and starts sounding like a nightmare.

Fines and wergild weren’t just “strongly suggested.” If you didn’t pay:

Your kin – your wider family group – were expected to help cover the amount.
If they refused, you risked becoming an outlaw, outside the protection of the law. Anyone could kill you without owing compensation.
In some cases, people who couldn’t pay their fines or wergild could end up in slavery – a kind of early debt recovery system with chains instead of emails.

There’s no modern insolvency practitioner to negotiate a payment plan, no “debt relief order,” no write-off. Your body and your freedom are the collateral.

It’s a reminder that:

Early “civil damages” and criminal punishment were closely mixed.
Unpaid compensation could flip very quickly into loss of status, land or liberty.

If today’s debt collection letters make people anxious, imagine a world where the “final notice” is a group of armed relatives at your door.

Anglo-Saxon Fines vs Modern Injury Compensation

Let’s put Æthelberht’s shattered limbs next to rough modern personal injury claim figures, just to see how the logic survives.

These modern ranges are approximate general damages only, based on current UK guideline summaries – real claims vary by country, lost earnings, care costs and so on.

Injury	Anglo-Saxon Fine (c. 600 AD)	Modern Injury Claim (UK, approx general damages)
Loss of a thumb	20 shillings	£43,000 – £67,000 for total loss of thumb
Loss of hearing in one ear	25 shillings (ear made deaf)	£38,000 – £56,000 for total loss of hearing in one ear
Broken rib	3 shillings	Up to around £3,950 for straightforward rib fractures
Legal process	Blood feud or king’s tariff court	Personal injury litigation, negotiation, and legal settlement via insurers

The numbers have changed. The logic hasn’t:

An injured body part → money damages.
The more function you lose, the higher the compensation.
The law decides what counts as “enough” money to close the case.

We’ve swapped shillings for five-figure payouts, and kinship groups for liability insurers, but the basic structure – injury, valuation, payment – is recognisably the same.

Sick Maintenance. Patient being seen by a doctor

Key Takeaways: Why This Feels Weirdly Modern

The Law of Æthelberht is the earliest English attempt to create a full tariff of injuries – a body-part price list to stop feuds.
It mixes wergild (man-price) and detailed injury fines, turning violence into compensation claims.
Your face, fingers and bones all had fixed cash values, with front teeth and thumbs priced higher than many other parts.
Failure to pay could mean outlawry or even slavery – a lethal version of debt enforcement.
Modern personal injury law, damages and legal settlements still follow the same basic idea: harm is converted into a structured money payment, instead of a vendetta.

The next time you see an advert saying “Injured at work? You may be entitled to compensation…”, remember that 1,400 years ago, an Anglo-Saxon king was already there – he just wrote his personal injury tariff in ink made of iron and oak, on the bodies and bank balances of his people. If you want to see an even harsher way of handling professional mistakes, compare this with our piece on the history of medical malpractice from Hammurabi’s Code to modern law, where bad surgery could cost a doctor both hands instead of a cash settlement.

FAQ: Anglo-Saxon Personal Injury and Wergild

Q1. What exactly was wergild?

Wergild (sometimes written weregild) literally means “man-price.” It was the legally fixed value of a person, based on their social rank. If someone was killed or seriously injured, the offender paid the victim’s family this wergild as compensation to avoid a blood feud

Q2. Did the Anglo-Saxons really have a price list for body parts?

Yes. The Law of Æthelberht sets out detailed tariffs: a set sum for each tooth, finger, ear, rib, and even for damaged speech or ruined facial appearance. For example, a front tooth was worth more than a back tooth, and a thumb was valued at 20 shillings.

Q3. Why did they turn injuries into money instead of using prisons?

Early Anglo-Saxon England didn’t rely on prisons. Instead, law aimed to stop long-running blood feuds. By turning injuries and killings into fixed debts – paid in shillings and wergild – the king offered a legal way to end disputes without endless revenge attacks.

Q4. How is this related to modern personal injury claims?

The idea is surprisingly similar: someone is harmed, and the law converts that harm into compensation. Today we talk about damages, personal injury claims and legal settlements; in Æthelberht’s day, they spoke of bot (compensation) and wergild, but the basic logic – money instead of revenge – is the same.

Q5. What happened if someone couldn’t pay their fine or wergild?

If a person couldn’t pay, their kin were expected to help. Refusal could lead to effective outlawry, and in some contexts failed payment could end in loss of status or even slavery – a brutal, early version of debt enforcement with no insolvency safety net.