Thai Legal Studies (2023) Vol. 3 No. 1 | 69–83
https://doi.org/10.54157/tls.261959
© 2023 by Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit

This is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The Arithmetic of Life in Pre-modern Siam: Ranking and Monetary Value in the Penal System

Chris Baker* and Pasuk Phongpaichit†

Abstract

Penal systems are a reflection of a society and its governance. The laws of pre-modern Siam, as collected in the Three Seals Code, included a law on punishment called Phrommasak. Although this text is applicable to only a narrow range of offences, it seems to have served as a reference point or model for punishment of other offences which today would be labelled as “civil.” The Phrommasak has three striking features: first, it prescribed punishments in the form of money paid as fines and compensation; second, these amounts were calculated to vary greatly according to social status as measured by sakdina; and third, the calculation of these amounts was highly intricate involving several arithmetic formulas, multiple dimensions, and Buddhist concepts. Although the prominent use of fines and the grading by social status can be traced to Indian sources, such as the Arthasastra, the scope and intricacy of the system in the Phrommasak appears to be unique. The Phrommasak reflects the nature of Ayutthaya Siam as a commercial or market society, conscious of its low population, where hierarchies on public display were important in structuring the society.

Keywords: Ayutthaya — Three Seals Code — Phrommasak — Penal systems — Fines

Penal systems are a reflection of a society and its governance. Descriptions of the penal systems of pre-modern Siam by foreign visitors tended to highlight the exotic and violent aspects including ordeal by fire or water, summary execution, beatings, and mutilation.¹ While such practices clearly were used, they give a misleading impression of the penal system as a whole. We suggest that the dominant mode of punishment for crimes arising from disputes between people (civil offences in today’s terminology) was the levy of money as fines and compensation. The methods for computing these penalties were set out in great detail in the Phrommasak,² one of the legal texts included in the collection known as the Three Seals Code, assembled in 1805. In this article, we summarise the methods for computing fines and compensation in the Phrommasak, review the use of punishments in other laws, and discuss the significance of the key festures of the penal system.

The courts in pre-modern Siam handed out a wide range of punishments including execution, confiscation of property, fines, mutilation, corporal punishment, shaming, warnings, and pardons. The law codes often presented the officials in charge of sentencing with a hierarchy of punishments to choose from depending on the severity of the case. For example, to punish a war profiteer, the law instructed as follows:

. . . impose punishment of one of eight grades, namely: 1. execute the villain; 2. strip them of all property and demote to cutting grass for elephants; 3. call for the money due to that phrai, hang round their neck to shame, then give 25 strokes of the leather lash; 4. dismiss from royal service and give 25 strokes of the rattan cane; 5. fine at quadruple rate; 6. fine at double rate; 7. fine once; 8. pardon the punishment.³

Phrommasak, the title of the law on punishment in the Three Seals Code, derives from the Sanskrit brahmadaṇḍa, Brahma’s rod, a mythical weapon that was adopted as a symbol for punishment in Buddhist law texts.⁴ The Thai transcription of brahmadaṇḍa as พรหมทันธ phrommathan appears in the text as an alternative title. The ending of –sak, from śakti meaning power in Sanskrit and both power and rank in Thai, probably results from the prominent role of rank in the calculation of punishments.⁵ Like other texts in the Three Seals Code, the Phrommasak is an archive of legal rulings which originate from different eras. Dating is difficult as the dates given in the prefaces to the various laws have often been corrupted, and the clauses may have appeared before or after these prefaces.⁶

The Phrommasak from 1805 has two major components that have been transcribed into the same document. These two are: the calculation of body-price by gender and age, and its use for calculating compensation for causing death; and the Phrommasak proper on the calculation of punishments for causing injury by verbal or physical means. This code is regularly referenced in other parts of the Three Seals Code. The Phrommasak also prescribes scales for commuting other forms of punishment, including corporal punishment and shaming, into fines paid in money. We suggest that the penalties detailed in the Phrommasak were the normal practice for offences arising from disputes between people.

I. Body-price

Every person in Ayutthaya society had a body-price (ค่าตัว, kha tua) as a simple function of gender and age. This section of the Phrommasak text has a preface with a date that Prasert na Nagara reckoned might be equivalent to 1573 CE,⁷ but this date did not mark the origin of this system. The preface narrates how the king was called upon to update the rates because the existing figures, given in the everyday currency of cowries, had become too low. The new rates are given in the currency based on weight in silver,⁸ perhaps to isolate them from deflation of the value of cowries.

The level of the body-price was clearly based on the capacity for physical labor. The price for males rose with age to a peak in the age bracket of 31–40 and then declined. The rate for a female was 20–25 percent below that for a male and peaked at 21–25 years. Disabilities or poor health reduced the price. For example, a disabled hand reduced the price by a quarter, and “babbling madness” reduced it by two-thirds. Children had a price, even those below the age of 7 years, which appears as the minimum working age in several laws. Presumably this price reflected their potential rather than current value. Children in the womb are not mentioned in this text, but in other laws were given a body-price of half that of their mother.⁹ Members of the royal guard enjoyed special rates.¹⁰

Table 1. Body-price by gender and age

* These two columns, which do not appear in the original, show the amounts in baht for easy comparison.

Figure 1. Body-price table from the manuscript. Source: กฎหมายตราสามดวง ฉบับราชบัณทิตยสถาน เล่ม ๒, น. 1046

The body-price had a role in the market for slaves though the details are not clear. Anyone could sell themselves or their dependents, including wife and children, into slavery. The law distinguished between slaves sold “at full price” (ขาดค่า, khat kha), who became the property of the buyer, and those sold “below full price” who were more like mortgaged property that would eventually return to the former owner.¹¹ The laws on slavery use the terminology of “body-price” but make no explicit reference to this table in the Phrommasak. Some other laws refer to slaves being sold “by age,” which seems to be a reference to the table,¹² but others suggest that pricing of slaves was determined by the market.¹³ Perhaps the table initially set indicative or control prices for transactions in slaves, but the market later overrode them.

The body-price was used for calculating compensation for causing a death, either accidental or deliberate murder. The level of compensation was a function of the body-price of the deceased and the sakdina of whoever caused the death. The formula is given as follows:

To calculate the base for death [for sakdina] from five to 400 rai, take [five for] the five aggregates,¹⁴ multiply by [seven for] the seven consequences,¹⁵ and multiply by 1,000 for the thousand angers,¹⁶ giving the base. Then take the base for death, for each level multiply by the sakdina, and divide this total by 700,000 to give the [multiplier of the] body price.¹⁷

The use of Buddhist vocabulary was perhaps intended to lend authority. The formula is:

5 x 7 x 1000 / 700,000 = 0.05 x sakdina

This formula appears to have been superseded in a later clause (cl. 15), which has a simpler calculation and gives higher rates for sakdina of 70 or below, but lower rates (roughly half) from there to 400 sakdina. Using this later version, Table 2 shows the compensation in baht for selected perpetrators by status and victims by gender and age.

Table 2. Compensation for death (baht)

The body-price was occasionally used in the calculation of punishments, for example, for using a curse such as “You are lovers with your mother,” when the statement was proved untrue;¹⁸ and for abducting a woman who then died during pregnancy.¹⁹ It was also used, rather curiously, to calculate how much had to be repaid as bridewealth when the woman’s family backed out of a marriage arrangment.²⁰

II. Computing punishment

The Phrommasak details the method for computing punishments for offences committed by one person on another, usually as the result of a dispute.²¹ All such offences could be calibrated into a value in cowries, which the guilty usually had to pay in two parts: half as compensation to the offended party, and half as a fine to the treasury.

In the law, three factors contributed to the calculation: the injury caused; the sakdina rank of the injured party; and the instrument used in the case of physical injury. A fourth factor operated during trial when, at sentencing, the judge might adjust the figure.

A. Injury

The first two factors map a look-up table (Table 3), which appears in the printed versions of the Phrommasak though is presented linearly in the original manuscripts.²² The injury appears on the horizontal axis and the sakdina level on the vertical axis. To establish the value in the top left cell, which anchors the table, there is again some Buddhist-infused arithmetic:

The holy teacher Manosara^[23] stated that, to make a phrommasak, take [ten for the] ten wholesome courses of action,^[24] add [one for] a single mind,^[25] multiply by [five for] the five controlling faculties,^[26] and multiply by [a thousand for] the thousand angers, giving the base for wrongdoing of the mind.^[27] Inscribe that as the base for offence.

The formula is: (10 + 1) x 5 x 1,000 = 55,000. This gives the figure for lamoet, the commission of an offence without any accounting of its physical consequences, a “wrongdoing of the mind,” that we might call “intention.”²⁸ This figure is then divided by five for “wrongdoing by speech” or verbal abuse, in the second column. The remaining nine columns are for graded forms of physical injury: bruise; swelling; contusion (blood visible under the skin); drawing blood; minor wound; split skin; knocking down; breaking a limb or organ; and blinding. The figures are computed by first dividing the base figure of 55,000 by 11 to give 5,000 and then applying a series of multipliers from 5 for bruising to 21 for blinding.

B. Social Rank

The base rates in the computation described above apply to a sakdina of 5, the rate for a slave. Between 5 and 400 sakdina, the lowest level of khun nang rank, the text lays down a series of multipliers from 1 to 20. Above 400 sakdina, the increases are made by addition rather than multiplication. The rates for 10,000 sakdina, the level of a major minister, are around 125 times those of a slave. The original table has twelve columns and 67 rows. Table 3 shows a selection.

Table 3. Selected rows and columns from the Phrommasak table

Note: The multiplier row does not appear in the original table.

C. Weapon

The rates in Table 3 apply to offences committed “by hand.” They are multiplied by one-and-a-half for offences committed with a wooden instrument, and by two for a metal instrument. This threefold classification of weapons was clearly inadequate. In the Law on Quarreling, there are several clauses which detail many other weapons. For example, clause 27 lists weapons which are rated the same as wood:

[If people] quarrel and beat one another, grasping back^[29] of knife, back of machete, back of pike, back of sword, lump of brick, clod of earth, tile, gravel, stone, laterite, horn, tusk, fang, bone, long shell,^[30] lump of dry rice, dry sweet, dry crisped rice, solid sugar, sugarcane cake, various eggs,^[31] rice plant, grass plant, rubbish, lump of dry meat or dry fish, whole fresh fish, cowries, dammar, hide, thread, ball of cotton, bunch of garlic, bunch of onions, galangal, ginger, banana, stick of sugarcane, dog dung, cattle dung, buffalo dung, elephant dung, tree fruit, leaves, whole branch, coconut shell, rope, vine, or cane, and beat, hit, throw, fling on another; or constrain another to die in a cangue or chains; or push another to fall on a pike, sword, knife, machete, axe, chisel, metal spear, metal javelin, trident, or goad, causing injury; or cause another to drown, shoot with a bullet, scratch with a fingernail, or bite with teeth; all of these, fine the same as for [injury by] wood.³²

A handful of clauses in the Phrommasak text prescribe rates for offences other than simple injury, such as locking someone up in chains or other restraints. These are calculated as multiples of the base rate for lamoet offence, with different formulae for different levels of sakdina. For example:

To calculate the fine for locking in chains, hitting the head with cloth or foot: take the rate for offence; for sakdina 20 and below, divide by 11 and multiply by 17; for sakdina from 25 up to 400 rai, take the rate for 20 rai and below and add one eleventh; if higher than 400 rai, add 40,000 for each 100 [rai of sakdina].³³

D. Judgment

At sentencing, the judge might reduce the figure by half in cases where extenuating circumstances suggested some leniency. Conversely, the judge might double, triple or quadruple the computed amount in three situations: where the accused had increased the burden on the court by cunning or obstruction; where the accused had used excessive violence; and where the incident had disturbed public order.

III. Commuting punishment

The laws deployed various penalties other than monetary fines, including mutilation, shaming, and corporal punishment, but many of these could be commuted into a money payment.

Crimes of violence and major forms of theft might be punished by mutilation such as cutting off fingers, toes, or a whole hand or foot. For example, the sentence for a gang who injured someone in the course of a robbery was “cut all ten fingers of the thief and gang who took part, do not let them carry weapons.”³⁴ Most minor crimes were penalized by beating with a rattan cane or leather lash. Many social crimes, such as adultery, were punished by public shaming, parading around the city with evidence of guilt. For example, in the case of a serial adulteress,

. . . have the man and woman shamed with the plow: place a chaleo stigma³⁵ on the forehead of the woman at fault, a red hibiscus behind both her ears, a garland of red hibiscus round her head or neck, put her in one side of a yoke, the male lover in the other side of the yoke, and shame them with the plow for three days.³⁶

Other forms of shaming were permanent, such as tattooing evidence of theft or adultery on the guilty person’s body or face.

In most cases, these other punishments could be commuted into money, as described in two clauses at the end of the Phrommasak. The first clause deals only with punishments of a wife found guilty of adultery, and specifies rates for avoiding forms of public shaming. The second clause sets out rates for avoiding mutilation, public shaming and beatings.

Table 4. Scale for commutation of punishments

These two clauses in the Phrommasak are sketchy, but clauses in other laws specify commutation rates, using similar principles, and sometimes in more detail.³⁹ The principle of allowing commutation seems to have been rather general. In a trial scene in the epic poem The Tale of Khun Chang Khun Phaen, Khun Chang is found guilty of adultery and sentenced to a fine, his mother and other household members are sentenced to public shaming as accessories, and all are sentenced to being beaten. When handing down these sentences, the judge assumes they will all be commuted into money.⁴⁰ A few clauses in the Three Seals Code specifically ban any commutation for certain offences, suggesting it was otherwise standard procedure.⁴¹

IV. punishments in general

The penalties in the Phrommasak apply specifically to cases of dispute among people which give rise to death or injury. Such cases are dealt with in detail in the Law on Quarrelling.⁴² Other laws often have instructions to “punish by the scale,” or “punish by the royal enactment,”⁴³ meaning the tables in the Phrommasak. The levying of money as fines and compensation seems to have been the dominant form of punishment for crimes other than the gravest and the pettiest.

In the Three Seals Code, there is a four-fold gradation of punishments using a Pali–Sanskrit vocabulary: มหันต์ ปถม มัทยม อวะสาน; mahan pathom mathayam awasan; mahanta pathama majjhima avasāna; major, primary, medium or least penalty.⁴⁴ This classification served as the framework for assigning punishments in part of the Law on Theft, and was referenced more occasionally elsewhere.

The offences that incurred “major” punishment were of five main types: offences against the king, including revolt, associating with royal women, and stealing royal property; offences against the religion including theft or desecration of religious buildings and objects;⁴⁵ murder or arson committed in the course of theft or other means of personal gain;⁴⁶ violent actions that disturbed the peace of the realm; and abuse of royally bestowed office or privilege for personal gain. The offender was usually executed or stripped of all property, including wives and children, or both, but this penalty might be eased.⁴⁷

The offences that incurred the fourth grade of “least” punishment included various misdemeanours, and were punished by shaming or light corporal punishment.⁴⁸

The offences between these extremes, those labelled as “primary” or “medium,” were usually punished by levying money but possibly with additional physical measures as retribution for violence, cunning, or extreme disrespect. Cases of theft which did not involve murder or arson were punished with fines, but also by corporal punishment or mutilation if the thieves used excessive violence, causing injury or damage.⁴⁹ Injury caused by quarrelling incurred fines and compensation but also corporal punishment if the offender injured a monk, brahman, or their own parents.⁵⁰ A man committing adultery with a married women, or molesting a woman, was fined, but also beaten if he had exercised violence.⁵¹ In offences committed in the course of trading and other economic activities, the usual punishment was a fine based on the value of the property involved (or a multiple thereof) with the addition of physical punishment for exceptional cunning or dishonesty.⁵² For example, those found guilty of forging documents were punished by “cutting off two fingers up to the wrist, not letting them hold a chalk.”⁵³ Punishment for abducting or stealing slaves was similar.⁵⁴ Fines and compensation were also imposed for offences connected with agriculture such as ploughing another’s land, allowing livestock to graze on another’s crop, diverting water, stealing soil, or damaging a crop.⁵⁵

In some instances, the laws prescribed detailed calculation of these fines. For example, on crop damage, the law prescribed rates varying according to the animal and to the stage of the crop from seedling to full ripeness; rates for damage to trees varied according to the fruit and the maturity of the tree; rates for taking fish from another’s paddyfield varied according to the type of trap used;⁵⁶ and fines for stripping the lowercloth from a woman varied according to the age and marital status of the woman.⁵⁷

V. discussion

The calculation of punishment in the Phrommasak and in other laws is distinctive in at least three ways: first, the punishment imposed for many offences committed between people was the levy of money as fines and compensation; second, the punishments varied greatly in severity according to social status; third, the calculation of these punishments was highly detailed, involving Buddhist concepts and arcane arithmetic, including a table with almost 800 cells.

To put the Siamese penal system’s emphasis on fining into perspective it is worth drawing a brief comparison with the systems in England and Europe in the same era. In England, punishments seem to have been principally designed to remove the offender from society, either permanently or temporarily. Between the 14th and 18th centuries, there was a trend of imposing the death penalty on more and more crimes, including arson, varieties of theft, and offences against religion. With advances in shipping, transportation overseas became an alternative means to remove an offender from society. From the 17th century, judicial authorities increasingly preferred to seclude convicts in prisons, workhouses, and houses of correction. Gradually imprisonment came to dominate. The penal systems in the main countries of western Europe followed a similar pattern of removing offenders from society.⁵⁸

Siam was more reluctant to remove people from society. Execution was prescribed for “major” offences, especially against the king or religion, but the laws also provided alternatives. Execution was also prescribed for murder, often in a spirit of retribution —“let [the murderer] go the same way”—particularly if the killing was notably violent or was carried out in the course of robbery or some other project for personal gain. But the section of the Phrommasak calculating the rates of compensation for causing death suggests that levying money may have been more common than execution.

In Siam, imprisonment was little used prior to judicial reforms made under western influence from the late 19th century. In the Ayutthaya era, prison was mainly used for detaining and interrogating suspects before trial, and for isolating specific kinds of people such as those reckoned to be deranged and hence unpredictable,⁵⁹ and those who deployed magic in the course of theft and murder.⁶⁰ Exile appears in the Three Seals Law only as a punishment for revolt or incest.⁶¹

This reluctance to remove people reflects a society which was conscious of the scarcity of people. As we have shown elsewhere,⁶² disease and warfare kept the population low. Ayutthaya’s rulers were conscious of the scarcity. They welcomed immigrants and swept people back from successful military campaigns. People were not sacrificed lightly.

Social status as measured by sakdina was the weightiest factor in the calculation of fines in the Phrommasak. Table 5 shows the potential contribution of four factors to this calculation. A minister paid 125 times more than a slave for the same offence. In the laws themselves, there is no explanation of the logic behind this. In part, perhaps, it was simply a form of progressive taxation. Revenue from fines entered the royal treasury. Sakdina was perhaps simply a proxy for the ability of the offender to pay. Perhaps also this system was designed to induce senior nobles to be exemplars of good behavior.

Table 5. Potential contribution of factors in the calculation of financial penalty for causing injury

Besides such considerations, the social gradations in the Phrommasak contributed to the multiple ways in which the people of Ayutthaya were arranged into visible hierarchies. Numerical systems of ranking were used for organizing society from early Ayutthaya. Officials had decimal ranks denoting the number of people theoretically under their command, such as nai roi (master of a hundred), hua muen (head of ten thousand), and so on. The sakdina system took this principle further by ranking all members of the society with a number ranging from 5 for a slave or pauper to 15 for a phrai, 400 for the lowest rank in the khun nang (official nobility), 10,000 for a senior minister, and royalty above that.⁶³ The body-price and the computation of punishment in the Phrommasak went beyond the principle of numerical ranking, denoting hierarchy, by using money, denoting value. Every person in society not only had a numerical rank, which denoted their relative position compared to others, but also had a monetary value which denoted their worth. These multiple hierarchies, constantly present in public view, were a means to structure a society which was light on institutions.

We have argued elsewhere,⁶⁴ following Yoneo Ishii and others, that Ayutthaya was predominantly an urban and commercial society rather than rural and agricultural. The penal system which makes large use of fines is a reflection of such a society. A system of levying money as punishment would not work in a society where many lived in a subsistence or near-subsistence economy.

The calculations in the Phrommasak are striking for their intricacy. The assignment of a body-price used a table with 50 cells⁶⁵ plus additional dimensions for mental and physical disability. The calculation of punishments used a table with 800-cells plus two additional dimensions for weapon used and judicial discretion. Several formulas were used to construct the second table. The main formulas had Buddhist concepts in place of the constants (“take [five for] the five aggregates, multiply by [seven for] the seven consequences”). The arithmetic echoed the calculations used in making a calendar or setting out a horoscope. Perhaps this intricacy was designed to claim that this determination of punishment was based on both morality and science. The penal code of ancient India, as described in the Arthasastra, relied heavily on fines and differentiated the punishment by social status and forms of injury, but had none of the intricate arithmetic found in the Phrommasak.⁶⁶

[Date of submission: 12 September 2022; Revision: 06 May 2023; Acceptance: 31 May 2023]

Suggested Bibliographic Citation:

Baker, Chris, and Pasuk Phongpaichit. “The Arithmetic of Life in Pre-modern Siam: Ranking and Monetary Value in the Penal System.” Thai Legal Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 69–83. https://doi.org/10.54157/tls.261959.