A standard story is that formal law is a great improvement over the informal institution of blood feuds, because such feuds tend to go on too long and get too disconnected from whatever harms were originally done. Is there any theoretical treatment of this, explaining or refuting such an argument?
There's an (I think unpublished) piece I once saw, which tried to estimate statistics on blood feuds from the Icelandic sagas. It's not clear how good the results are, since the process of getting into a saga--even assuming they are history and not fiction--is a highly nonrandom filter. But the conclusion was that almost all of them terminated quite rapidly.
I've also just been reading about modern Gypsies; it turns out that some gypsy communities (the ones mentioned were in England and Finland) use blood feud. The authors of the chapter seem to think the level of actual violence is pretty low. Their conjecture is that blood feud was abandoned in gypsy communities that for some reason became sedentary--that a migratory lifestyle made it more workable, because if things got too unpleasant one party could leave. That doesn't fit the Icelandic case--but the Icelandic system was much more developed, with explicit laws and courts, than the gypsy system.
Also, such (not very good) evidence as there is on the Icelandic case suggests that the actual death rate from violence wasn't very high.
One obvious advantage of the blood feud system is that it makes it in the interest of a family to control bad behavior by its members.
Incidentally, I gather from reading up on the Hatfields and McCoys some time back that their feud had pretty well terminated when one of the state governments involved intervened to revive it. The whole story seems to be almost as much a feud between two adjacent states, with the Hatfields politically influential in one and the McCoys in the other, as between two families. But it's a complicated story.
An alternative explanation of why royal authority replaces feud is that it's a revenue grab by the state. Medievals seem to have had a pretty realistic view of law enforcement as a revenue source. -- David Friedman Professor of Law Santa Clara University [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
