Definition
A term from Saxon law meaning to put out another person's eye. Under the Anglo-Saxon legal system, the act was treated as a specific, defined offense carrying a fixed pecuniary penalty of fifty shillings. Rather than pursuing criminal punishment in a modern sense, Saxon law addressed bodily injuries through a structured tariff of monetary compensations — payments made to the victim or the victim's kin in satisfaction of the wrong. The blinding or destruction of an eye was among the named injuries in this system, with its assigned price set at fifty shillings.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical and comparative legal dictionaries as an illustration of Anglo-Saxon compensatory injury law. Researchers encountering it are almost certainly working in one of three contexts: (1) historical surveys of early English law and the development of tort or criminal liability; (2) comparative legal history examining how bodily injury was monetized before the emergence of common law courts; or (3) secondary sources on the bót system — the broader Saxon framework of fixed payments for specific wrongs.
The term itself will not appear in operative legal documents, statutes, or case law from any jurisdiction recognizable to modern researchers. Its research value is entirely illustrative: it anchors a specific point in legal history where personal injury was resolved through payment schedules rather than imprisonment or restitution adjudicated by courts. Researchers tracing the intellectual lineage of compensatory damages in tort law sometimes work backward through these Saxon tariffs to establish the deep roots of victim-centered remedies.
Note that all four historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus that carry this term trace back to the same short passage, likely derived from Wharton's Lexicon — meaning the corpus offers convergent but not independently sourced coverage. Any researcher seeking depth beyond this definition should go directly to primary Anglo-Saxon legal sources and modern scholarship on early English law.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four Law Mind source dictionaries — Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), Burrill's, and Rapalje & Lawrence — carry virtually identical entries. The definition is consistent across all: to put out an eye, punishable by a fine of fifty shillings under Saxon law. Burrill's and Rapalje & Lawrence explicitly attribute the definition to Wharton's Lex (Wharton's Law Lexicon), identifying the chain of derivation clearly.
Rapalje & Lawrence is the only source that adds any elaboration beyond the core definition, though the additional text in that entry appears to be a copying artifact — the sentence beginning "impose silence during the proceedings" is from an unrelated entry and does not belong to this term. Researchers should treat that passage as a transcription anomaly, not substantive content about crepare oculum.
None of the historical dictionaries provide context for how the fifty-shilling figure compared to other Saxon injury tariffs, nor do they situate this offense within the broader bót and wergild framework. That analytical work must be sourced elsewhere.
Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs to pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon law and has no operative jurisdiction in any modern legal system. It surfaces only in historical and comparative legal scholarship concerning early English law.