Note 93 — Chapter X · IONIC PORTION OF HELLAS. — ATHENS BEFORE SOLON.

See Colonel Leake’s Travels in Northern Greece, ch. 2, p. 85 (the Greek word φράτριαι seems to be adopted in Albania); Boué, La Turquie en Europe, vol. ii, ch. 1, pp. 15-17; chap. 4, p. 530; Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland (vol. vi, pp. 1542-1543, of Tonson’s edition of Spenser’s Works, 1715); Cyprien Robert, Die Slaven in Turkey, b. 1, chs. 1 and 2.

So, too, in the laws of king Alfred in England, on the subject of murder, the guild-brethren, or members of the same guild, are made to rank in the position of distant relatives, if there happen to be no blood relatives:—

“If a man, kinless of paternal relatives, fight and slay a man, then, if he have maternal relatives, let them pay a third of the wēr: his guild-brethren a third part: for a third let him flee. If he have no maternal relatives, let his guild-brethren pay half: for half let him flee.... If a man kill a man thus circumstanced, if he have no relatives, let half be paid to the king, half to his guild-brethren.” (Thorpe, Ancient Laws and Institutes of England, vol. i, pp. 79-81.) Again, in the same work, Leges Henrici Primi, vol. i, p. 596, the ideas of the kindred and the guild run together in the most intimate manner: “Si quis hominem occidat,—Si eum tunc cognatio sua deserat, et pro eo gildare nolit,” etc. In the Salic law, the members of a contubernium were invested with the same rights and obligations one towards the other (Rogge, Gerichtswesen der Germanen, ch. iii, p. 62). Compare Wilda, Deutsches Strafrecht, p. 389, and the valuable special treatise of the same author (Das Gildenwesen im Mittelalter. Berlin, 1831), where the origin and progress of the guilds from the primitive times of German heathenism is unfolded. He shows that these associations have their basis in the earliest feelings and habits of the Teutonic race,—the family was, as it were, a natural guild,—the guild, a factitious family. Common religious sacrifices and festivals,—mutual defence and help, as well as mutual responsibility,—were the recognized bonds among the congildones: they were sororitates as well as fraternitates, comprehending both men and women (deren Genosser wie die Glieder einer Familie enge unter einander verbunden waren, p. 145). Wilda explains how this primitive social and religious phratry (sometimes this very expression fratria is used, see p. 109) passed into something like the more political tribe, or phylê (see pp. 43, 57, 60, 116, 126, 129, 344). The sworn commune, which spread so much throughout Europe in the beginning of the twelfth century, partakes both of the one and of the other,—conjuratio,—amicitia jurata (pp. 148, 169).

The members of an Albanian phara are all jointly bound to exact, and each severally exposed to suffer, the vengeance of blood, in the event of homicide committed upon, or by, any one of them (Boué, ut supra).