It is a commonplace of nineteenth-century legal history that monetary compensation overtook feuding, and that such a development – fostered by the Church – set justice on its way towards its fulfillment in centralized regnal authority, public peace, and state-mandated punishment. Recent legal history has revised this model of linear evolution from feud to monetary compensation to punishment, and emphasized instead both the simultaneity of revenge and compensation systems, and the coexistence of opposing pro- and anti-revenge arguments. Attention has turned to the gradual change from a logic of feud (the early seventh century being the earliest date for recorded Anglo-Saxon law) to a logic of punishment as an indication of the Christianization of law, a change well underway by the eleventh century. Thought of as two vectors of force, vengeance tracks a horizontal line of reciprocal violence between (roughly) equal bodies (whether kin or entire communities), while punishment thrusts vertically and unidirectionally down from top (state, ecclesiastical, or regnal power) to bottom with a mandate of authority that pre-empts, at least in theory, reprisal from family and friends of the disciplined offender.

The new emphasis on corporal punishment in the later codes – a kind of Christianized violence – anticipates the twelfth-century spiritual economics of purgatory that enables pre-payment of a sinner’s debt to God. Theologizing of law moves social order from the compensatory to the disciplinary, as pain itself increasingly expiates wrongdoing, offering the offender the possibility of a subject position with the experiential capacity for increasingly refined passio.

It is open to question, however, whether the revenge/punishment distinction will hold absolutely. As Ian Miller observes, it is a fine line between handing over body parts in payment to having them taken in punishment. Later Anglo-Saxon law refashions revenge into punishment, and the example par excellence of this is King Edgar’s law of talion, now lost but retained in II Cnut 30.4–5, where the prescribed mutilations are designed both to deter other possible offenders and to save the soul of the actual offender by provoking suffering without death. The salvific dimension of pain points us in the direction of an ancient Greek saying (mathein pathein), namely, that learning hurts, conversely, that punishment teaches. However, a king’s motives for punishment – deterrence (that he may control his subjects), rehabilitation, prevention – need not exclude that of retribution.