Vendetta, the term used to denote the practice, as it existed till lately in Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, of individuals taking private vengeance upon those who had shed the blood of their relatives. It is not yet entirely extinct in Calabria and Corsica, and even in remote districts of Kentucky and other parts of the United States, and indeed was an established institution in primitive society everywhere. Our criminal law is merely a development of a stage of culture when it was every man's right and duty to take the law into his own hands. Bloodshed had to be atoned for by death, and if the actual slayer had escaped his kinsfolk were held responsible for his deeds, and he was punished through vengeance taken upon them. This primitive law of vengeance of blood afforded an elementary means of protection for society, and the fact that the whole family are held responsible brings to bear the full pressure of the family influence to make each of its members keep the peace. The Avenger of Blood is thus a useful functionary, but through ignorance and passion he is prone to err and confound the innocent with the guilty. In the usage of the Israelites we see the method of progress in civilisation—a distinction is made between the wilful and the innocent slayer, and the Cities of Refuge afford the latter a Sanctuary (q.v.). Again we see how the cry for vengeance sinks into a claim for compensation—the blood-money wipes out the blood. Our Anglo-Saxon forefathers had their wêr-gild ('man-money'), a money value on each man's life which had to be paid to his kinsmen by the murderer—600 shillings for a thegn, 200 for a ceorl, and naturally less for a Welshman than an Englishman. The law of retaliation—the Roman lex talionis—held also for lesser injuries, and was sound morality enough till it was superseded by the higher law of the Gospel. Now the state undertakes the task of punishment, but, as Tylor says, we have still survivals of ancient modes of feeling in such phrases as 'the vengeance of the law,' or the legal form by which a private person is bound over to prosecute as though still suing for his own revenge or compensation. The right of private war between families and tribes long survived in the Borders and the Highlands; but Freeman notes that the battle (1470) between Lord Berkeley and Lord Lisle at Nibley Green in Gloucestershire, in which the latter was slain and Berkeley compounded by a money payment to the widow, was the latest English example either of private war or the payment of the wêr-gild.
Of all civilised races the vendetta has survived longest among the Italians, and even so late as 1890 it showed itself in strange juxtaposition to the law in the murder at New Orleans of the chief of police who had been instrumental in bringing to light some of the organised murders of the Maffia (q.v.). In Corsica it was a sacred article of duty, so binding that it needed not the rimbicco, the wail of reproach against delay, to spur up the consciences of the next of kin. Here it often happened that its course was complicated by the vendetta transversale, when each of two sets of relatives had a murder to avenge on the other. Méréme's Colomba is a striking picture of the intensity with which the imaginations of the Corsican women clung to the wild justice of this form of revenge. And something similar in spirit, as the vendetta of a class or community rather than a person or family, were the cruel murders and outrages committed by Irish peasants or their hirelings upon those who had occupied land from which other men had been evicted. In Corsica at least it needed the burning outrage of blood to rouse the spirit of the vendetta. See BLOOD (AVENGER OF).