Definition
In Anglo-Saxon law, the angylde was the legally fixed rate at which compensation was to be paid for certain injuries to person or property. It operated on two related levels: (1) as the standardized valuation of a person — equivalent to the "were" or wergild, the price set upon a man's life or injury according to his social rank — and (2) as the official fixed price at which cattle and other goods were received in payment of legal obligations, a rate understood to have been set considerably higher than the prevailing market price (the ceapgild).
The angylde thus functioned simultaneously as a personal injury tariff and as a monetary standard for in-kind payment within the early English compensation system.
Common Confusion
Angylde is closely related to, but distinct from, several overlapping Anglo-Saxon legal terms. The wergild (or "were") was the total valuation placed on a man's life for purposes of homicide compensation; angylde appears to represent the single-payment rate applicable to injuries short of death, or the baseline unit from which higher multiples (twyhynde, sixhynde, twelfhynde) were calculated. The ceapgild, by contrast, was the ordinary market price of goods — specifically what distinguished commercial exchange from legally compelled payment. Researchers who encounter angylde in historical sources should resist collapsing it into either wergild or ceapgild; each term occupied a distinct position in the Saxon compensation architecture.
Why It Matters in Research
Angylde is a term you will encounter almost exclusively in historical and comparative legal sources dealing with Anglo-Saxon law. It does not survive into modern common law as an operative term, so its research value is archaeological: it illuminates the structure of the pre-Conquest English compensation system that later influenced the development of tort concepts, debt, and monetary valuation in English law.
Several traps await researchers working in historical sources. First, the term is inconsistently spelled across manuscript traditions and secondary literature — variant forms include angild, angeld, and angylde — so corpus searches must account for spelling variation. Second, the relationship between angylde and the graduated wergild system (twyhynde, sixhynde, twelfhynde) is not fully resolved in the secondary literature; some scholars treat angylde as a synonym for the single wergild rate, while others treat it as a distinct payment category. Third, Black's 2nd Edition entry for angylde appears to be physically concatenated in the source text with a definition fragment for "anguish" — a typesetting artifact of the original print edition that can cause confusion when reading digitized versions of the dictionary.
For researchers tracing the historical roots of tort compensation, the angylde is a useful entry point into the broader literature on Anglo-Saxon dooms (law codes), particularly those associated with Æthelberht, Ine, and Alfred, where tariffed compensation schedules are most fully developed.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary draw on Wharton's Law Lexicon for this entry, and both convey substantially the same definition. The first edition is slightly more complete; the second edition's entry is truncated, apparently due to a printing error that cuts the definition mid-sentence after "the fixed price at which." Neither edition provides a citation to a primary Anglo-Saxon source, leaving the definition without documentary grounding beyond Wharton's secondary synthesis.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the graduated multiplier system built on top of the angylde unit (whereby certain aggravated offenses were compensable at two, three, or more times the angylde rate), the distinction between bot (amendable compensation) and wite (punitive payment to the king), or the angylde's relationship to the broader system of suretyship and pledge that enforced payment. Researchers needing more than a basic gloss should not rely on Black's alone and should consult specialized treatments of Anglo-Saxon law.
Jurisdictional Note
Angylde is a term of Anglo-Saxon English law exclusively. It has no counterpart in Scots, Welsh, or Irish legal traditions, though analogous compensation tariff systems existed in those legal cultures under different names. It carries no operative legal meaning in any modern jurisdiction.