Forfang: a reward for retrieving stolen property, probably 10th century

Forfang: a reward for retrieving stolen property. Anonymous, probably 2nd quarter of the 10th century. Transcription and translation from Old English of Textus Roffensis folio 32r by Dr Christopher Monk.

The three lines of this fragmentary text is the ‘summary clause’ of an anonymous code known today as Forfang,¹ which deals with the reward for retrieving stolen property, both human (i.e. slaves) and animal (specifically, horses). The Textus Roffensis scribe seems to have been working from a truncated exemplar, so he did not include the remaining text of this law (Wormald, p. 369). In fact, Forfang, a little peculiarly, is presented as if it is the final part of the previous law, which concerns arson and murder (which can be found here).²

The summary clause in isolation is confusing. It begins to make sense once we take into account what it is summarising. The full text of Forfang is found in the manuscript Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 383, at folio 9v, and the late Patrick Wormald’s interpretation of this is as follows:

The gist is that ‘wise men have ordained (witan habbað gerædd)’ that the reward is to be fifteen pence, whether for men (i.e. runaways) or horses, throughout the whole land, regardless of the number of shires traversed in the search. It had once been the case that rewards were proportionate to the distances involved, and paid at the rate of one penny for every shilling’s worth of goods stolen, but it was now thought unfair to burden the ‘small man’ with the cost of an excessive reward as well as extended travel. (Wormald, p. 369.)

The summary clause thus specifies that the reward the owner was to pay the finder for retrieving his stolen goods was now to be fixed at 15 pennies in every case.

Transcription

32r (select folio number to open facsimile)

Forfang ofer eall, sy hit on
anre scipe,³ sy hit on ma, fiftyne peningas,
⁊ æt ælcon smalon orfe, æfre æt scyllinge penig.

Translation

See Translation Notes

The reward everywhere, be it over one shire or more, [shall be] fifteen pennies, and so with the property of any small [man], ever before at one penny [per] one shilling[‘s worth of goods].

Bibliography

Wormald, Patrick. The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century (Blackwell, 1999).

Website

Parker Library On the Web: Manuscripts in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Parker Library On the Web Home

Footnotes

1 Many thanks to Elise Fleming for proofreading the introduction, translation and notes.

2 For more on the transmission of Forfang, see Wormald, p. 370.

3 ‘scipe’ is an error for ‘scire’.