Definition
Msgbote (also rendered as mægbote in related sources) is a term from Saxon law denoting the compensation or satisfaction owed to the kinsmen of a person who has been slain. It is a specific category of monetary payment within the broader Anglo-Saxon system of compensatory justice, directed not to the victim's lord or the crown, but to the family and kindred of the deceased. The payment acknowledged the injury suffered by the kin group as a collective consequence of the killing.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The term does not exist in modern general usage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The term was already archaic by the nineteenth century.
This is pure legal-historical terminology with no common English counterpart. The concept, however, maps loosely onto modern notions of wrongful death damages paid to surviving family members — though the legal mechanics and social underpinnings differ fundamentally.
Common Confusion
Msgbote is one component within a layered Anglo-Saxon compensation structure and should not be conflated with related but distinct payments. Wergild (or wergeld) was the total blood-price set for a person's life, calibrated to their social rank, and served as the overarching compensatory sum. Manbot was the compensation owed specifically to the slain person's lord for the loss of a servant or follower. Msgbote, by contrast, ran to the kindred. A researcher encountering these terms in historical sources must treat them as separate obligations that could coexist following a single killing — the same death might trigger wergild, manbot, and msgbote simultaneously, payable to different recipients.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research trap here is orthographic instability. Anglo-Saxon legal terms were transcribed inconsistently across centuries of manuscript copying, Norman-influenced legal writing, and early modern antiquarian scholarship. The same concept appears variously as mægbote, magbote, maegbote, and msgbote across different sources. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should search all plausible variant spellings before concluding a source is silent on the point.
The term appears almost exclusively in sources dealing with pre-Conquest English law. After the Norman Conquest, the compensation-to-kindred system was progressively displaced by crown-centered criminal justice, and msgbote as a live legal category effectively disappears from operative law. It survives thereafter only in legal antiquarianism — in the work of scholars reconstructing Saxon institutions. Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum is the cited authority in Black's and remains the foundational reference point for this and related Saxon compensation terms.
Researchers approaching this term in the context of legal history, comparative law, or the historiography of tort and criminal law should treat it as evidence of a legal culture in which harm to a person was simultaneously harm to a kin group — a conception of legal personality and obligation that differs structurally from both modern tort and modern criminal law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) defines msgbote simply as, in Saxon law, "a recompense or satisfaction for the slaying or murder of a kinsman," citing Spelman. This entry is brief to the point of being skeletal, which is itself informative: by the time Black's was compiled, the term was of purely antiquarian interest and the editors allocated minimal space accordingly.
The citation to Spelman refers to Henry Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum, a seventeenth-century scholarly glossary of archaic legal and ecclesiastical terms. Spelman's work remains a standard reference for Anglo-Saxon legal vocabulary and is the chain through which most later legal dictionaries — including Black's — relay their definitions of Saxon-era terms. Researchers should be aware that Spelman was working from manuscripts at considerable remove from the original Saxon law, and his glosses, while authoritative for their era, reflect early modern interpretive assumptions.
No significant divergence exists among the historical sources because the historical sources are themselves sparse. The definition is not contested — it is simply narrow and underdeveloped in the secondary literature.
Jurisdictional Note
Msgbote is exclusively a term of pre-Conquest English law. It has no operative presence in any modern jurisdiction and is not adopted, modified, or referenced in American, Canadian, or post-Conquest English law as a live legal concept.