/1/ This choice of heirs [359]
recalls the quos heredes appellavit of the Salic law just
mentioned, and may be compared with the language of a Norman
charter of about the year 1190: "To W. and his heirs, to wit
those whom he may constitute his heirs." /1/
A perfect example of a singular succession worked out by the
fiction of kinship is to be found in the story of Burnt Njal, an
Icelandic saga, which gives us a living picture of a society
hardly more advanced than the Salian Franks, as we see them in
the Lex Salica. A lawsuit was to be transferred by the proper
plaintiff to another more versed in the laws, and better able to
carry it on,-- in fact, to an attorney. But a lawsuit was at that
time the alternative of a feud, and both were the peculiar affair
of the family concerned. /2/ Accordingly, when a suit for killing
a member of the family was to be handed over to a stranger, the
innovation had to be reconciled with the theory that such suit
belonged only to the next of kin. Mord is to take upon himself
Thorgeir's suit against Flosi for killing Helgi, and the form of
transfer is described as follows.
"Then Mord took Thorgeir by the hand and named two witnesses to
bear witness, 'that Thorgeir Thofir's son hands me over a suit
for manslaughter against Flosi Thord's son, to plead it for the
slaying of Helgi Njal's son, with all those proofs which have to
follow the suit.
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