A Source Book of Mediaeval History Part 6

[Sidenote: Rights of inheritance]

=2.= If the father and mother do not survive, and he leave brothers or sisters, they shall inherit.

=3.= But if there are none, the sisters of the father shall inherit.

=4.= But if there are no sisters of the father, the sisters of the mother shall claim the inheritance.

=5.= If there are none of these, the nearest relatives on the father's side shall succeed to the inheritance.

=6.= Of Salic land no portion of the inheritance shall go to a woman; but the whole inheritance of the land shall belong to the male s.e.x.[67]

LXII.

[Sidenote: Payment of wergeld]

=1.= If any one's father shall have been slain, the sons shall have half the compounding money [wergeld]; and the other half, the nearest relatives, as well on the mother's as on the father's side, shall divide among themselves.[68]

=2.= But if there are no relatives, paternal or maternal, that portion shall go to the fisc.[69]

FOOTNOTES:

[39] St. Martin was born in Pannonia somewhat before the middle of the fourth century. For a time he followed his father's profession as a soldier in the service of the Roman emperor, but later he went to Gaul with the purpose of aiding in the establishment of the Christian Church in that quarter. In 372 he was elected bishop of Tours and shortly afterwards he founded the monastery with which his name was destined to be a.s.sociated throughout the Middle Ages. This monastery, which was one of the earliest in western Europe, became a very important factor in the prolonged combat with Gallic paganism, and subsequently a leading center of ecclesiastical learning.

[40] Childeric I., son of the more or less mythical Merovius, was king from 457 to 481. Clovis became ruler of the Salian branch of the Franks in this latter year. The tomb of Childeric was discovered at Tournai in 1653.

[41] aegidius and his son Syagrius were the last official representatives of the Roman imperial power in Gaul; and since the fall of the Empire in the West even they had taken the t.i.tle of "king of the Romans" and had been practically independent sovereigns in the territory between the Somme and the Loire, with their capital at Soissons, northeast of Paris.

[42] Alaric II., king of the Visigoths, 485-507.

[43] The battle of Soissons in 486, with the defeat and death of Syagrius, insured for the Franks undisputed possession southward to the Loire, which was the northern frontier of the Visigothic kingdom.

[44] The Campus Martius was the "March-field," i.e., the a.s.sembling place of the Frankish army. It was not regularly in any one locality but wherever the king might call the soldiers together, as he did every spring for purposes of review. In the eighth century the month of May was subst.i.tuted for March as the time for the meeting.

[45] In the words of Hodgkin (_Charles the Great_, p. 12), "the well-known story of the vase of Soissons ill.u.s.trates at once the German memories of freedom and the Merovingian mode of establishing a despotism. As a battle comrade the Frankish warrior protests against Clovis receiving an ounce beyond his due share of the spoils. As a battle leader Clovis rebukes his henchman for the dirtiness of his accoutrements, and cleaves his skull to punish him for his independence."

[46] The Alemanni were a German people occupying a vast region about the upper waters of the Rhine and Danube. They had been making repeated efforts to acquire territory west of the Rhine--an encroachment which Clovis resolved not to tolerate.

[47] The battle was fought near Stra.s.sburg, in the upper Rhine valley.

[48] The ultimate result of the defeat of the Alemanni was that the Frankish kingdom was enlarged by the annexation of the great region known in the later Middle Ages as Suabia, comprising modern Alsace, Baden, Wurtemberg, the western part of Bavaria, and the northern part of Switzerland. The Alemanni as a people disappeared speedily from history, being absorbed by their more powerful neighbors. Their only monument to-day is the name by which the French have always known the people of Germany--_Allemands_.

[49] The Loire was the boundary between the dominions of the two kings. There have been many famous instances in history of two sovereigns coming together to confer at some point on the common border of the territories controlled by them, notably the interview of Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I. on the Niemen River in 1807. The Franks and the Visigoths had been enemies ever since by Clovis's defeat of Syagrius their dominions had been brought into contact (486), and the present jovial interview of the two kings did not long keep them at peace with each other.

[50] St. Hilary was bishop of Poitiers in the later fourth century. He was a contemporary of St. Martin of Tours and a co-worker with him in the organization of Gallic Christianity.

[51] The plain of Vouille was ten miles west of Poitiers.

[52] This amusing comment of Gregory was due largely to his prejudice in favor of the Franks and against the heretical Visigoths.

[53] The Visigothic kingdom in Spain, with its capital at Toledo, endured until the Saracen conquest of that country in 711 and the years immediately following, but it did not give evidence of much strength. It stood so long only because the Pyrenees made a natural boundary against the Franks and because, after Clovis, for two hundred years the Franks produced no great conqueror who cared to crowd the Visigoths into still closer quarters.

[54] Clovis, particularly after his conversion to Christianity in 496, was the hero of Gregory's history and apparently the enthusiastic old bishop did not lose an opportunity to glorify his career. At any rate it would certainly be difficult to relate anything more remarkable about him than this legend of the walls of Angouleme falling down before him at his mere approach.

[55] This notable campaign had advanced Frankish territory to the Pyrenees, except for the strip between these mountains and the Rhone, known as Septimania, which the Visigoths were able to retain by the aid of the Ostrogoths from Italy. No great number of Franks settled in this broad territory south of the Loire, and to this day the inhabitants of south France show a much larger measure of Roman descent than do those of the north. It may be added that Septimania was conquered by Clovis's son Childebert in 531, and thus the last bit of old Gaul--practically modern France--was brought under Frankish control.

[56] This was Cloderic, son of Sigibert the Lame, king of a tribe of Franks living along the middle Rhine. Sigibert was one of the numerous independent and rival princes whom Clovis used every expedient to put out of the way.

[57] Along the Upper Weser, near the monastery of Fulda.

[58] Ragnachar's kingdom was in the region about Cambrai.

[59] The _mallus_ was the local court held about every six weeks in each community or hundred. In early German law the state has small place and the principle of self-help by the individual is very prominent. To bring a suit one summons his opponent himself and gets him to appear at court if he can. Ordinarily the court merely determines the method by which the guilt or innocence of the accused may be tested. Execution of the sentence rests again with the plaintiff, or with his family or clan group.

[60] "The monetary system of the Salic law was taken from the Romans.

The basis was the gold _solidus_ of Constantine, 1/72 of a pound of gold. The small coin was the silver _denarius_, forty of which made a _solidus_. This system was adopted as a monetary reform by Clovis, and the statement of the sum in terms of both coins is probably due to the newness of the system at the time of the appearance of the law."--Thatcher and McNeal, _Source Book for Mediaeval History_, p. 17.

The gold _solidus_ was worth somewhere from two and a half to three dollars, but its purchasing power was perhaps equal to that of twenty dollars to-day, because gold and silver were then so much scarcer and more valuable. Such estimates of purchasing power, however, involve so great uncertainty as to be practically worthless.

[61] The Burgundian law (Chap. 41) contained a provision that if a man made a fire on his own premises and it spread to fences or crops belonging to another person, and did damage, the man who made the fire should recompense his neighbor for his loss, provided it could be shown that there was no wind to drive the fire beyond control. If there was such a wind, no penalty was to be exacted.

[62] The law of the Lombards had a more elaborate system of fines for wounds than did the Salic code. For example, knocking out a man's front teeth was to be paid for at the rate of sixteen _solidi_ per tooth; knocking out back teeth at the rate of eight _solidi_ per tooth; fracturing an arm, sixteen _solidi_; cutting off a second finger, seventeen _solidi_; cutting off a great toe, six _solidi_; cutting off a little toe, two _solidi_; giving a blow with the fist, three _solidi_; with the palm of the hand, six _solidi_; and striking a person on the head so as to break bones, twelve _solidi_ per bone.

In the latter case the broken bones were to be counted "on this principle, that one bone shall be found large enough to make an audible sound when thrown against a shield at twelve feet distance on the road; the said feet to be measured from the foot of a man of moderate stature."

[63] The man who had "thrown away his shield" was the coward who had fled from the field of battle. How the Germans universally regarded such a person appears in the _Germania_ of Tacitus, Chap. 6 (see p.

25). To impute this ignominy to a man was a serious matter.

[64] This was the so-called "triple wergeld." That is, the lives of men in the service of the king were rated three times as high as those of ordinary free persons.

[65] Here is an ill.u.s.tration of the personal character of Germanic law. There is one law for the Frank and another for the Roman, though both peoples were now living side by side in Gaul. The price put upon the life of the Frankish n.o.ble who was in the king's service was 600 _solidi_ (-- 3), but that on the life of the Roman n.o.ble in the same service was but half that amount. The same proportion held for the ordinary freemen, as will be seen by comparing ---- 1 and 6.

[66] A leet was such a person as we in modern times commonly designate as a serf--a man only partially free.

[67] This has been alleged to be the basis of the misnamed "Salic Law"

by virtue of which no woman, in the days of the French monarchy, was permitted to inherit the throne. As a matter of fact, however, the exclusion of women from the French throne was due, not to this or to any other early Frankish principle, but to later circ.u.mstances which called for stronger monarchs in France than women have ordinarily been expected to be. The history of the modern "Salic Law" does not go back of the resolution of the French n.o.bles in 1317 against the general political expediency of female sovereigns [see p. 420].

[68] The wergeld was the value put by the law upon every man's life.

Its amount varied according to the rank of the person in question. The present section specifies how the wergeld paid by a murderer should be divided among the relatives of the slain man.

[69] That is, to the king's treasury.

CHAPTER V.

THE ANGLES AND SAXONS IN BRITAIN