in Early Medieval Law Although significant advances have been made in the exploration of rational elements in medieval law, our thinking on this subject is still inhibited by the temptation to see the mixture of rational and irrational as a stage in a supposed progression from unreason to reason, which we chart by reference to our own, often unquestioned, system of values. There has been no radical shift in the bases of our assumptions since the days of the great lawyerhistorians of the late nineteenth century. The comparative materials which Pollock found in his contemporary India and Sir Henry Maine in Homeric Greece were used by them chiefly as auxilium imaginationis, in Pollock's phrase. Valuable though such exercises were in quickening the past, they made little critical impact on the value judgments of that confident age. Today, only the blindly optimistic would join Vinogradoff in emphasizing the distance traversed by mankind since the barbaric beginnings. Yet the majority of medievalists would probably still agree that an immense distance separated them from their early medieval forebears-remote as the Azande or the Nuer, to quote but one. Those who are interested in spanning that gap tend to start out with feelings of estrangement which the occasional encounter with a modern tribal situation does nothing to diminish. It is small wonder if we fail to make sense of some of the evidence or to