Gradually there would arise the idea of proportionate punishment, of which the characteristic type is the lex talionis, 1 " an eye for an eye."
The Lex Saxonum has come down to us in two MSS.
The qualifications for the office were fixed in each town by a special law for that community (lex municipalis).
It is state-law; alike self-help, blood-feud, marriage by capture, are absent; though family solidarity, district responsibility, ordeal, the lex talionis, are primitive features that remain.
In the criminal law the ruling principle was the lex talionis.
