BLOOD FEUD (AS. ftrh.f, from fah. inimical; OHO. fehide, injury, enmity, Ger. Fehdc. feud). In primitive society, the legalized right of private vengeance for crimes of violence. The institution of the feud and its regulation by law, involving. as it. does, a restriction on the primary impulse of revenge, marks a great advance in the direc tion of a settled social order. The primitive theory of the responsibility of the family, elan, and tribe for the acts of its members tended to convert an act of private vengeance into a state of war. The developing sense of law and order restricted the right of vengeance to the immedi ate family, or next of kin, called the 'avenger of blood' (see AVENGER OF BLOOD) of the injured person, and limited the punishment to the person committing the crime or to those who protected him from the vengeance incurred. The right was further restricted by the doctrine of sanctuary (q.v.) and the institution of places of refuge for the manslayer fleeing from the avenger of blood (see ASYLUM; CITY OF REFUGE), and, at a later period, by the institution of the wergild (q.v.), with which the bunted criminal might purchase exemption from the vengeance due him. Ulti mately the acceptance of this blood-money (q.v.) became compulsory, and the codes of early law which have come down to us are full of minute regulations fixing the amount to be paid for various crimes of violence according to the state or dignity of the victim of the crime, and speci fying the persons entitled to share in the pay ment.
The stage of society marked by the blood feud has prevailed among most of the primitive peoples with whom we are acquainted, and it forms a part of nearly all systems of primitive law.
find marked traces of it in the Mosaic legisla tion• and it constitutes an important part of the law of the Teutonic communities which planted themselves on the ruins of the Roman Empire.
Anglo-Saxon law is largely concerned with it, and in England it survived, nominally, at least, in the form of the wager of battle, until abol ished by act of Parliament in 1819. (See BATTLE, TRIAL BY; FEUD.) Consult : Jenks, Lau' and Politics in the Middle Ages; N nine, Ancient Law (11th Eng. ed., London, 1887). and Lectures on the Early History of Institutions ed., Lon don, 1893) ; Pollock and :Maitland, History of English Law (2d ed., London and Boston, 1899) ; and Stephen, History of the Criminal Law of England (London, 1883).