Definition
In Anglo-Saxon law, angild (also rendered "angeld" or "angild") is the single valuation or single compensatory payment owed for a man or thing. It represents the base unit of the weregild system — the assessed worth of a person or object expressed as a one-fold payment. Where a single weregild was insufficient as a penalty or where law demanded a multiplied satisfaction, the angild served as the unit of multiplication: twigild was double, trigild was triple, and so forth.
Angild is not a freestanding remedy so much as a calibration unit within the broader Anglo-Saxon scheme of compensatory justice. A single wrongful act might be satisfied by angild alone; aggravated circumstances or repeated offenses could trigger an obligatory multiple.
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Common Confusion
ANGILD should not be confused with weregild itself. Weregild is the comprehensive system of man-valuation and the sum owed for a killing; angild is a specific denomination within that system — the single-fold measure. Weregild might be set at angild, or it might be set at a multiple thereof. The two terms operate at different levels of abstraction: weregild names the obligation, angild names the unit. Researchers encountering references to "twigild" or "trigild" in Anglo-Saxon legal texts should locate the applicable angild first, as it functions as the arithmetic base for all multiplied compensations.
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Why It Matters in Research
Angild is primarily a term of historical and comparative legal research rather than a living legal concept. Researchers will encounter it in:
**Anglo-Saxon legal texts and glossaries.** Angild appears in discussions of the Dooms of the Anglo-Saxon kings and in scholarly commentary on early English law. Because the primary sources are in Old English or Latin, secondary glosses and translations vary. The Spelman reference cited in both editions of Black's points to Sir Henry Spelman's glossary work, which remains the most cited authority for this cluster of terms.
**Weregild scholarship.** Any serious engagement with the weregild system requires understanding angild as the baseline unit. Researchers mapping how compensation was calculated across classes of persons (ceorls, thegns, nobility) will find that the class-differentiated weregild amounts are almost always expressed as multiples of a base angild value, though sources differ on what the base figure was for each social rank.
**Trap for modern researchers: false equivalences.** Do not assume angild maps cleanly onto modern tort damages or criminal fines. The weregild system operated within a social structure of kinship obligation and public peace-maintenance that has no direct modern analogue. Translating angild figures into purchasing-power equivalents is methodologically contested; historians of Anglo-Saxon England have debated these valuations extensively, and Black's compact entry does not engage that complexity.
**Jurisdictional and temporal scope.** This is a pre-Conquest English legal term. It does not appear in post-Norman legal sources as an operative concept, though it surfaces in antiquarian legal scholarship well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both the first and second editions of Black's Law Dictionary carry virtually identical entries, indicating the term was treated as stable reference matter rather than contested doctrine. Both editions cite Spelman as authority — a reasonable attribution given that Spelman's *Glossarium Archaiologicum* was for centuries the standard reference for obsolete Anglo-Saxon legal terminology.
Neither edition elaborates on the social structure underlying the term, the variation in angild values across ranks, or the procedural context in which a court or assembly would determine whether single or multiplied compensation applied. The entries function as vocabulary glosses rather than analytical accounts. Researchers should not treat Black's coverage here as substantive legal history; it captures the term's basic meaning accurately but leaves the surrounding system largely unexplained.
The consistent cross-reference to twigild and trigild in both editions is genuinely useful, signaling to researchers that angild is the first term in a graduated series and that the multiplied forms are found under their own headwords.
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