Debt

by David Graeber

  Most of what we know about the economy of early Medieval Ireland comes from legal sources—a series of law codes, drawn up by a powerful class of jurists, dating roughly from the seventh to ninth centuries ad. These, however, are exceptionally rich. Ireland at that time was still very much a human economy. It was also a very rural one: people lived in scattered homesteads, not unlike the Tiv, growing wheat and tending cattle. The closest there were to towns were a few concentrations around monasteries. There appears to have been a near total absence of markets, except for a few on the coast—presumably, mainly slave or cattle markets—frequented by foreign ships.16

  As a result, money was employed almost exclusively for social purposes: gifts; fees to craftsmen, doctors, poets, judges, and entertainers; various feudal payments (lords gave gifts of cattle to clients who then had to regularly supply them with food). The authors of the law codes didn’t even know how to put a price on most goods of ordinary use—pitchers, pillows, chisels, slabs of bacon, and the like; no one seems ever to have paid money for them.17 Food was shared in families or delivered to feudal superiors, who laid it out in sumptuous feasts for friends, rivals, and retainers. Anyone needing a tool or furniture or clothing either went to a kinsman with the relevant craft skills or paid someone to make it. The objects themselves were not for sale. Kings, in turn, assigned tasks to different clans: this one was to provide them with leather, this one poets, this one shields … precisely the sort of unwieldy arrangement that markets were later developed to get around.18

  Money could be loaned. There was a highly complex system of pledges and sureties to guarantee that debtors delivered what they owed. Mainly, though, it was used for paying fines. These fines are endlessly and meticulously elaborated in the codes, but what really strikes the contemporary observer is that they were carefully graded by rank. This is true of almost all the “Barbarian Law Codes”—the size of the penalties usually has at least as much do with the status of the victim as it does with the nature of the injury—but only in Ireland were things mapped out quite so systematically.

  The key to the system was a notion of honor: literally “face.”19 One’s honor was the esteem one had in the eyes of others, one’s honesty, integrity, and character, but also one’s power, in the sense of the ability to protect oneself, and one’s family and followers, from any sort of degradation or insult. Those who had the highest degree of honor were literally sacred beings: their persons and possessions were sacrosanct. What was so unusual about Celtic systems—and the Irish one went further with this than any other—was that honor could be precisely quantified. Every free person had his or her “honor price”: the price that one had to pay for an insult to the person’s dignity. These varied. The honor price of a king, for instance, was seven cumal, or seven slave girls—this was the standard honor price for any sacred being, the same as a bishop or master poet. Since (as all sources hasten to point out) slave girls were not normally paid as such, this would mean, in the case of an insult to such a person’s dignity, one would have to pay twenty-one milk cows or twenty-one ounces of silver.20 The honor price of a wealthy peasant was two and a half cows, of a minor lord, that, plus half a cow additionally for each of his free dependents—and since a lord, to remain a lord, had to have at least five of these, that brought him up to at least five cows total.21

  Honor price is not to be confused with wergeld—the actual price of a man or woman’s life. If one killed a man, one paid goods to the value of seven cumals, in recompense for killing him, to which one then added his honor price, for having offended against his dignity (by killing him). Interestingly, only in the case of a king are the blood price and his honor price the same.

  There were also payments for injury: if one wounds a man’s cheek, one pays his honor price plus the price of the injury. (A blow to the face was, for obvious reasons, particularly egregious.) The problem was how to calculate the injury, since this varied according to both the physical damage and status of the injured party. Here, Irish jurists developed the ingenious expedient of measuring different wounds with different varieties of grain: a cut on the king’s cheek was measured in grains of wheat, on that of a substantial farmer in oats, on that of a smallholder merely in peas. One cow was paid for each.22 Similarly, if one stole, say, a man’s brooch or pig, one had to pay back three brooches or three pigs—plus his honor price, for having violated the sanctity of his homestead. Attacking a peasant under the protection of a lord was the same as raping a man’s wife or daughter, a violation of the honor not of the victim, but of the man who should have been able to protect them.

  Finally, one had to pay the honor price if one simply insulted someone of any importance: say, by turning the person away at a feast, inventing a particularly embarrassing nickname (at least, if it caught on), or humiliating the person through the use of satire.23 Mockery was a refined art in Medieval Ireland, and poets were considered close to magicians: it was said that a talented satirist could rhyme rats to death, or at the very least, raise blisters on the faces of victims. Any man publicly mocked would have no choice but to defend his honor; and, in Medieval Ireland, the value of that honor was precisely defined.

  I should note that while twenty-one cows might not seem like much when we are dealing with kings, Ireland at the time had about 150 kings.24 Most had only a couple of thousand subjects, though there were also higher-ranking, provincial kings for whom the honor price was double.25 What’s more, since the legal system was completely separate from the political one, jurists, in theory, had the right the demote anyone—including a king—who had committed a dishonorable act. If a nobleman turned a worthy man away from his door or feast, sheltered a fugitive, or ate steak from an obviously stolen cow, or even if he allowed himself to be satirized and did not take the offending poet to court, his price could be lowered to that of a commoner. But the same was true of a king who ran away in battle, or abused his powers, or even was caught working in the fields or otherwise engaging in tasks beneath his dignity. A king who did something utterly outrageous—murdered one of his own relatives, for example—might end up with no honor price at all, which meant not that people could say anything they liked about the king, without fear of recompense, but that he couldn’t stand as surety or witness in court, as one’s oath and standing in law was also determined by one’s honor price. This didn’t happen often, but it did happen, and legal wisdom made sure to remind people of it: the list, contained in one famous legal text, of the “seven kings who lost their honor price,” was meant to ensure that everyone remembered that no matter how sacred and powerful, anyone could fall.

  What’s unusual about the Irish material is that it’s all spelled out so clearly. This is partly because Irish law codes were the work of a class of legal specialists who seem to have turned the whole thing almost into a form of entertainment, devoting endless hours to coming up with every possible abstract possibility. Some of the provisos are so whimsical (“if stung by another man’s bee, one must calculate the extent of the injury, but also, if one swatted it in the process, subtract the replacement value of the bee”) that one has to assume they were simply jokes. Still, as a result, the moral logic that lies behind any elaborate code of honor is laid out here in startling honesty. What about women? A free woman was honored at precisely 50 percent of the price of her nearest male relative (her father, if alive; if not, her husband). If she was dishonored, her price was payable to that relative. Unless, that is, she was an independent landholder. In that case, her honor price was the same as that of a man. And unless she was a woman of easy virtue, in which case it was zero, since she had no honor to outrage. What about marriage? A suitor paid the value of the wife’s honor to her father and thus became its guardian. What about serfs? The same principle applied: when a lord acquired a serf, he bought out that man’s honor price, presenting him with its equivalent in cows. From that moment on, if anyone insulted or injured the serf, it was seen an attack on the lord’s honor, and it was up to the lord to collect
the attendant fees. Meanwhile the lord’s honor price was notched upward as a result of gathering another dependent: in other words, he literally absorbs his new vassal’s honor into his own.26

  All this, in turn, makes it possible to understand both something of the nature of honor, and why slave girls were kept as units for reckoning debts of honor even at a time when—owing no doubt to church influence—they no longer actually changed hands. At first sight it might seem strange that the honor of a nobleman or king should be measured in slaves, since slaves were human beings whose honor was zero. But if one’s honor is ultimately founded on one’s ability to extract the honor of others, it makes perfect sense. The value of a slave is that of the honor that has been extracted from them.

  Sometimes, one comes on a single haphazard detail that gives the game away. In this case it comes not from Ireland but from the Dimetian Code in Wales, written somewhat later but operating on much the same principles. At one point, after listing the honors due to the seven holy sees of the Kingdom of Dyfed, whose bishops and abbots were the most exalted and sacred creatures in the kingdom, the text specifies that

  Whoever draws blood from an abbot of any one of those principal seats before mentioned, let him pay seven pounds; and a female of his kindred to be a washerwoman, as a disgrace to the kindred, and to serve as a memorial to the payment of the honor price.27

  A washerwoman was the lowest of servants, and the one turned over in this case was to serve for life. She was, in effect, reduced to slavery. Her permanent disgrace was the restoration of the abbot’s honor. While we cannot know if some similar institution once lay behind the habit of reckoning the honor of Irish “sacred” beings in slave-women, the principle is clearly the same. Honor is a zero-sum game. A man’s ability to protect the women of his family is an essential part of that honor. Therefore, forcing him to surrender a woman of his family to perform menial and degrading chores in another’s household is the ultimate blow to his honor. This, in turn, makes it the ultimate reaffirmation of the honor of he who takes it away.

  What makes Medieval Irish laws seem so peculiar from our perspective is that their exponents had not the slightest discomfort with putting an exact monetary price on human dignity. For us, the notion that the sanctity of a priest or the majesty of a king could be held equivalent to a million fried eggs or a hundred thousand haircuts is simply bizarre. These are precisely the things that ought to be considered beyond all possibility of quantification. If Medieval Irish jurists felt otherwise, it was because people at that time did not use money to buy eggs or haircuts.28 It was the fact that it was still a human economy, in which money was used for social purposes, that it was possible to create such an intricate system whereby it was possible not just to measure but to add and subtract specific quantities of human dignity—and in doing so, provide us with a unique window into the true nature of honor itself.

  The obvious question is: What happens to such an economy when people do begin to use the same money used to measure dignity to buy eggs and haircuts? As the history of ancient Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean world reveals, the result was a profound—and enduring—moral crisis.

  Mesopotamia (The Origins of Patriarchy)

  In ancient Greek, the word for “honor” was tīme. In Homer’s time, the term appears to have been used much like the Irish term “honor price”: it referred both to the glory of the warrior and the compensation paid as damages in case of injury or insult. Yet with the rise of markets over the next several centuries, the meaning of the word tīme began to change. On the one hand, it became the word for “price”—as in, the price of something one buys in the market. On the other, it referred to an attitude of complete contempt for markets.

  Actually, this is still the case today:

  In Greece the word “timi” means honor, which has been typically seen as the most important value in Greek village society. Honor is often characterized in Greece as an open-handed generosity and blatant disregard for monetary costs and counting. And yet the same word also means “price” as in the price of a pound of tomatoes.29

  The word “crisis” literally refers to a crossroads: it is the point where things could go either of two different ways. The odd thing about the crisis in the concept of honor is that it never seems to have been resolved. Is honor the willingness to pay one’s monetary debts? Or is it the fact that one does not feel that monetary debts are really that important? It appears to be both at the same time.

  There’s also the question of what men of honor actually do think is important. When most of us think of a Mediterranean villager’s sense of honor, we don’t think so much of a casual attitude toward money as of a veritable obsession with premarital virginity. Masculine honor is caught up not even so much in a man’s ability to protect his womenfolk as in his ability to protect their sexual reputations, to respond to any suggestion of impropriety on the part of his mother, wife, sister, or daughter as if it were a direct physical attack on his own person. This is a stereotype, but it’s not entirely unjustified. One historian who went through fifty years of police reports about knife-fights in nineteenth-century Ionia discovered that virtually every one of them began when one party publicly suggested that the other’s wife or sister was a whore.30

  So, why the sudden obsession with sexual propriety? It doesn’t seem to be there in the Welsh or Irish material. There, the greatest humiliation was to see your sister or daughter reduced to scrubbing someone else’s laundry. What is it, then, about the rise of money and markets that cause so many men to become so uneasy about sex?31

  This is a difficult question, but at the very least, one can imagine how the transition from a human economy to a commercial one might cause certain moral dilemmas. What happens, for instance, when the same money once used to arrange marriages and settle affairs of honor can also be used to pay for the services of prostitutes?

  As we’ll see, there is reason to believe that it is in such moral crises that we can find the origin not only of our current conceptions of honor, but of patriarchy itself. This is true, at least, if we define “patriarchy” in its more specific Biblical sense: the rule of fathers, with all the familiar images of stern bearded men in robes, keeping a close eye over their sequestered wives and daughters, even as their children kept a close eye over their flocks and herds, familiar from the book of Genesis.32 Readers of the Bible had always assumed that there was something primordial in all this; that this was simply the way desert people, and thus the earliest inhabitants of the Near East, had always behaved. This was why the translation of Sumerian, in the first half of the twentieth century, came as something of a shock.

  In the very earliest Sumerian texts, particularly those from roughly 3000 to 2500 bc, women are everywhere. Early histories not only record the names of numerous female rulers, but make clear that women were well represented among the ranks of doctors, merchants, scribes, and public officials, and generally free to take part in all aspects of public life. One cannot speak of full gender equality: men still outnumbered women in all these areas. Still, one gets the sense of a society not so different than that which prevails in much of the developed world today. Over the course of the next thousand years or so, all this changes. The place of women in civic life erodes; gradually, the more familiar patriarchal pattern takes shape, with its emphasis on chastity and premarital virginity, a weakening and eventually wholesale disappearance of women’s role in government and the liberal professions, and the loss of women’s independent legal status, which renders them wards of their husbands. By the end of the Bronze Age, around 1200 bc, we begin to see large numbers of women sequestered away in harems and (in some places, at least), subjected to obligatory veiling.

  In fact, this appears to reflect a much broader worldwide pattern. It has always been something of a scandal for those who like to see the advance of science and technology, the accumulation of learning, economic growth—“human progress,” as we like to call it—as necessarily leading to greater human freedo
m, that for women, the exact opposite often seems to be the case. Or at least, has been the case until very recent times. A similar gradual restriction on women’s freedoms can be observed in India and China. The question is, obviously, Why? The standard explanation in the Sumerian case has been the gradual infiltration of pastoralists from the surrounding deserts who, presumably, always had more patriarchal mores. There was, after all, only a narrow strip of land along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that could support intensive irrigation works, and hence, urban life. Civilization was thus from early times surrounded by a fringe of desert people, who lived much like those described in Genesis and spoke the same Semitic languages. It is undeniably true that, over the course of time, the Sumerian language was gradually replaced—first by Akkadian, then by Amorite, then by Aramaic languages, and finally, most recently of all, by Arabic, which was also brought to Mesopotamia and the Levant by desert pastoralists. While all this did, clearly, bring with it profound cultural changes as well, it’s not a particularly satisfying explanation.33 Former nomads appear to have been willing to adapt to urban life in any number of other ways. Why not that one? And it’s very much a local explanation and does nothing, really, to explain the broader pattern. Feminist scholarship has instead tended to emphasize the growing scale and social importance of war, and the increasing centralization of the state that accompanied it.34 This is more convincing. Certainly, the more militaristic the state, the harsher its laws tended to be toward women. But I would add another, complementary argument. As I have emphasized, historically, war, states, and markets all tend to feed off one another. Conquest leads to taxes. Taxes tend to be ways to create markets, which are convenient for soldiers and administrators. In the specific case of Mesopotamia, all of this took on a complicated relation to an explosion of debt that threatened to turn all human relations—and by extension, women’s bodies—into potential commodities. At the same time, it created a horrified reaction on the part of the (male) winners of the economic game, who over time felt forced to go to greater and greater lengths to make clear that their women could in no sense be bought or sold.