Definition
In Saxon law, a triple payment equal to three times the assessed value of a thing, rendered as composition or satisfaction for a wrong. Trigild was a form of compensatory settlement in which the wrongdoer paid not merely the value of what was taken or damaged, but three times that value to the injured party or their kin. It belongs to the broader Anglo-Saxon system of tariffed compensation in which monetary payments substituted for blood vengeance and resolved legal disputes between parties.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The term has no modern common usage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The term did not appear in general dictionaries of the period.
Trigild is pure legal and historical jargon with no meaningful presence in ordinary English. No COMMON LANGUAGE gap analysis is required.
Why It Matters in Research
Trigild is a term of art from Anglo-Saxon law that will appear primarily in treatises on early English legal history, glossaries of Saxon and Norman legal vocabulary, and sources drawing on Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum, which is the foundational reference cited by all three source dictionaries. Researchers encountering this term in pre-Conquest or early post-Conquest legal texts should understand it as one point on a scale of multiplied payments — alongside twigild (double) and other geld-based compositions — rather than as a standalone doctrine.
The principal research trap is conflating trigild with Roman-law treble damages. The two concepts superficially resemble each other — both involve a payment of three times some base value — but they arise from entirely separate legal traditions, operate on different procedural foundations, and appear in incompatible bodies of source material. Roman treble damages (triplum) were a remedy imposed by a court; trigild was a privately negotiated or customarily fixed composition paid to extinguish a claim. Conflating them in a historical research context distorts both.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should also be alert to variant spellings and Latinized forms. Burrill's entry identifies the Latin form trigeldum, and sources drawing on medieval Latin glossaries may use that spelling exclusively. Spelman's Glossarium uses both forms. Searching only on trigild may miss relevant passages; a thorough search should include trigeldum, tri-gild, and geld-family terms more broadly.
Because trigild functions as one tier within the Anglo-Saxon geld system, it cannot be fully understood in isolation. Research context almost always requires parallel engagement with gild/geld, twigild (double payment), and weregild (the composition paid for homicide), as well as with the bot-and-wite framework that governed how compensations were allocated between the injured party and the crown or lord.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core definition: a triple payment of value as composition or satisfaction in Saxon law. All three cite Spelman as the authority, and Burrill's entry is the most complete, supplying the Saxon etymological components (thry, three; gelde, payment) and the Latin form trigeldum.
Black's first edition reproduces the definition in condensed form without the etymological note. Notably, the second edition entry for trigild runs directly into the entry for trinepos without a clear break in the digitized text — a transcription artifact that researchers should be aware of when consulting that source; trinepos is a separate civil-law term and has no connection to trigild.
None of the three dictionaries place trigild in the broader context of the Anglo-Saxon compensation scale or explain its relationship to weregild and bot, which is the most significant gap in the historical dictionary coverage. For that context, Spelman's Glossarium itself, or secondary works on Anglo-Saxon law such as those of Liebermann or Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law, are necessary supplements.
Jurisdictional Note
Trigild is a term of purely historical significance, specific to Anglo-Saxon England before and immediately after the Norman Conquest. It has no operative legal meaning in any modern jurisdiction. Its relevance today is confined to legal history, historical linguistics, and scholarship on early medieval English law.