The Pravda of Yaroslav, the oldest part of the Russkaya Pravda

The Pravda of Yaroslav, also called the Oldest Pravda, forms the first eighteen articles of the Short Redaction of the Russkaya Pravda. Its first article reads: ‘If a man kills a man, the brother is to avenge his brother, or the son his father, or the father his son, or the son of a brother or of a sister; if there is no one to avenge him, 40 grivnas for the head’ — the same whether the victim was a Rus’ or a Slovene (a Novgorodian), a member of the prince’s retinue, a merchant, a sword-bearer or an outcast. The following articles fix payments for blows and wounds — 3 grivnas and the healer’s fee for a bloody or bruised wound, 3 grivnas for a cut-off finger — and deal with riding another man’s horse without asking, with damage to property and with a slave who struck a free man, and they set rules of evidence.

The Younger Recension of the Novgorod First Chronicle inserts the text under 1016: after the victory at Liubech, Yaroslav sent the Novgorodians home with money and gave them a charter by which to live. Most scholars accept that date, but S. V. Yushkov and M. N. Tikhomirov placed the Pravda in the 1030s. The code survives only within the Short Redaction, in two 15th-century copies of that chronicle, and was rediscovered by Vasily Tatishchev in the 1730s. It is followed by the Pravda of Yaroslav’s sons, often dated to 1072; in the third quarter of the 11th century Yaroslav’s sons abolished blood vengeance altogether, replacing it with payments.