Definition
Orgild is a term from Anglo-Saxon law meaning "without recompense" or "without payment of compensation." It describes the legal condition of a person killed in circumstances deemed lawful, such that no wergild (blood money or compensatory payment) was owed to the slain person's family or kin. In practical terms, a killing judged to be orgild carried no financial or legal obligation of satisfaction — the death was recognized by the community and its law as justified, and the killer was absolved of the duty to compensate.
The term operates as the negation of the foundational Anglo-Saxon compensation system. Where ordinary homicide triggered an obligation to pay wergild to the victim's kindred, orgild signaled that the killing fell outside that obligation entirely.
Why It Matters in Research
Orgild appears almost exclusively in historical legal dictionaries and glossaries of Anglo-Saxon law. Researchers are unlikely to encounter it in primary sources unless working directly with Old English legal texts, Domesday-era materials, or scholarly treatises on Germanic customary law. It is not a term with any operative modern legal life.
The significance of orgild lies in what it illuminates about the structure of early English law. The Anglo-Saxon legal system did not draw a sharp line between criminal punishment and civil compensation in the way modern law does. Wergild — the price set on a person's life according to their rank — was the primary mechanism of social order after a killing. Orgild is therefore not merely a word meaning "justifiable homicide" in a modern sense; it is a specific legal status within a compensation-based framework that had no analog to prosecution, imprisonment, or state sanction. Researchers who read orgild through the lens of modern criminal law will miss this structural context entirely.
When researching Anglo-Saxon law, orgild should be understood alongside its positive counterpart wergild, and within the broader system of bot (compensatory payment for injuries) and wite (fines payable to a lord or king). A killing might be orgild and still generate a wite payable to the crown, depending on the circumstances — the term addresses only the private compensation dimension.
Researchers should also note that Black's reference to Spelman points to Sir Henry Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum, a seventeenth-century glossary of obsolete legal and historical terms. Spelman is the underlying source authority here, not an independent English court record. Any chain of authority for this term runs through Spelman's compilations of Old English and Norman materials, which themselves require evaluation as secondary reconstructions of earlier usage.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's Law Dictionary entries are substantively identical, differing only in minor formatting. Both cite Spelman as authority. Neither entry expands beyond the core definition — no examples of application, no distinction between categories of lawful killing that might produce orgild status, and no connection to parallel concepts in other Germanic legal traditions (such as Frankish or Norse law, where similar compensation-exemption concepts existed).
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the procedural dimension: how a killing came to be judged orgild, what body or process made that determination, and whether the declaration had formal legal effect beyond relieving the killer of wergild liability. These are questions that Black's does not answer, and researchers will need to turn to specialized scholarship on Anglo-Saxon law — such as the works of Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland in The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I — for any substantive treatment.
Jurisdictional Note
Orgild is specific to Anglo-Saxon England and has no application in any modern jurisdiction. It belongs entirely to the historical legal order that preceded the Norman Conquest and the subsequent transformation of English law. Its relevance today is purely antiquarian and scholarly.