In Germanic law, compensation or penalty paid to a wronged person or their family, literally meaning 'angle-price' or a payment for injury.
From Old English and Old High German 'angild,' combining 'an' (one, a) + 'gild' (payment, price). Medieval legal systems used such payments instead of imprisonment to settle disputes.
Before modern courts existed, if someone injured you, their family would negotiate a payment—a sort of legal bribe that kept feuds from escalating into generations of revenge, making 'angild' one of history's earliest alternatives to violent punishment.
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