Definition
In Saxon law, agild (also rendered as "ageld") denotes a status of exemption from penalty — specifically, freedom from the obligation to pay the gild or weregild. The weregild was the system of compensatory payments by which offenders (or their kin) satisfied obligations arising from injury or killing. To be agild was to stand outside that obligation: neither bound to pay nor, in some usages, subject to the associated forfeiture or fine.
The term operates as a status descriptor in early English legal sources rather than as a cause of action or procedural concept. It signals the absence of a liability that was otherwise near-universal under Saxon customary law.
Common Confusion
AGILD / WEREGILD / GILD: These three terms form a cluster that researchers may encounter without clear distinctions. Gild refers broadly to a payment, tribute, or compensatory sum. Weregild (literally "man-payment") is the specific tariffed compensation owed for homicide or serious injury, scaled to the victim's social rank. Agild is the negation of that obligation — the condition of being free from it. A researcher encountering agild in a historical source should resist reading it as a synonym for either of the other two; it describes exemption, not the payment itself.
Why It Matters in Research
Agild is a term with almost no life outside early English legal history and the dictionaries that catalogued Saxon law. Researchers will encounter it primarily in two contexts: glossaries and antiquarian compilations drawing on Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum or Cowell's Interpreter, and secondary treatments of Anglo-Saxon law that address the weregild system.
The practical research traps are narrow but real. First, the term appears inconsistently spelled across historical sources — agild, ageld, and occasional variant forms — so full-text corpus searches should account for spelling variation. Second, because the concept is purely documentary (no living legal system applies it), the term functions as a historical marker rather than operative legal language; any source using it in a contemporary legal argument warrants scrutiny. Third, researchers working backward from later common law concepts of immunity or exemption from penalty should be cautious about drawing direct doctrinal lines through agild — the Saxon compensatory system was structurally distinct from later criminal or tortious liability frameworks, and the exemption agild describes does not map cleanly onto modern immunity doctrine.
Within a corpus of historical legal dictionaries, agild is useful as a reference point for understanding the weregild system in its totality. Its presence in a source can help date or contextualize that source's engagement with Saxon legal antiquities.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both first and second editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on the substance of this entry. All three define agild as the condition of being free from penalty and specifically free from the weregild obligation. The definitions are brief and consistent, each tracing authority to Spelman and Cowell.
Burrill adds the most texture: he supplies the component etymology (a, without, and gild, a payment) and the Latin gloss sine mulcta vel compensatione ("without fine or compensation"), which clarifies that the exemption covered both punitive and compensatory dimensions. This Latin rendering is useful for researchers working with medieval Latin sources alongside English-language glossaries.
None of the three dictionaries address the mechanism by which agild status was acquired — whether by royal grant, social rank, or other means — which reflects a broader gap in the dictionary treatment of Saxon law concepts. For that level of detail, researchers must move to primary antiquarian sources, particularly Spelman's Glossarium.