Mægasetas of Herefordshire and Gloucestershire, and the mægth name, the g sound having passed into y, probably appears in many Old English place-names. Nor is the end of the sippe wanting among our ancient topographical names. The nail, as the name for the limit of kindred, perhaps, still survives in those of Nailsworth, Nailsea, and the stream called Nailbourn in Kent. In a charter relating to land at Salwarpe in Worcestershire in 817 the Nælcsbroc is mentioned as a boundary stream.[1] These names are only curious survivals or dim shadows at the present day, but they were full of life and meaning to our Old English forefathers.
When a man committed a crime in Wessex, as we learn from the laws of King Alfred, two-thirds of the wergeld or fine had to be paid by his father’s mægth, and one-third by his mother’s mægth.[2] As the individual members of the mægth became powerful and wealthy, a tendency appeared on the part of the rich to discard their poorer kin. Thus, a freeman need not pay the wergeld of a slave or of one who had forfeited his freedom.[3] Moreover, as time went on, the tendency to weaken the tie of kinship was encouraged by the State, which had much to fear from the independence of powerful families, and whose peace was endangered by the continuance of the old system of private vengeance,[4] which was one of the old obligations of kinsmen if the wergeld was not paid them. King Edmund tried to break this down by permitting a mægth to abandon their kinsmen guilty of homicide. The influence of the Church also tended to weaken the kindred tie in the case of religious Orders, for those who became monks lost all the rights of kindred. In some cases, also. a man lost his family rights as a penalty. In the forty-second law of Alfred it is ordered that a man who should attack his foe after he had yielded
