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274 10. law in the western kingdoms
peoples. If one sees the Salic Law as a code promulgated by royal authority,
this view has a great deal to be said for it, particularly if the other Salian
kings had been disposed of before Clovis’ conversion. This would then
explain both the pagan character and the geographical scope of the law. 64
Yet, working still on the assumption that the Salic Law was promulgated
by royal authority, there are objections arising from the letter in which
Remigius, bishop of Rheims, welcomed Clovis’ accession to power. 65 In it
he implies that Clovis’ authority, and that of his father before him,
extended over the whole of the Roman province of Belgica Secunda. This
province included Cambrai, which is where Gregory of Tours placed
Ragnachar. Moreover, one element in Clovis’ authority, inherited from
Childeric, was his role as judge, which Remigius perceives in completely
Roman terms. 66 The Angers material used by Gregory of Tours also
shows that Childeric’s activities were on a much larger scale than one
would expect from a mere king of Tournai. 67 Childeric appears to have
been in close collaboration for part of his career with Aegidius, magister
militum, while Remigius’ letter suggests that he had found it possible to
work well with the bishops. It is not therefore necessary to assume that
Clovis must have disposed of the other Salian kings before the promulgation
of the Salic Law.
On these grounds and on the basis of the numismatic evidence, the possibility
remains that the Salic Law belongs to the time not of Clovis but of
Childeric. Childeric would then have promulgated the law as principal king
of the Salian Franks; its Roman characteristics – principally its organization
into titles – would be explained by his connections with men such as
Aegidius and Remigius, while its complete lack of any support for
Christianity would pose no problem at all. On the other hand, it is difficult
to see how an earlier dating than Childeric’s reign could be reconciled with
Title 47’s implied reference to Salian Franks who lived beyond the Loire. In
the reign of Chlodio in the second quarter of the fifth century – a date
which would fit perfectly the numismatic evidence as interpreted by
Grierson and Blackburn – the Salian Franks had only just established a permanent
presence west of the silva Carbonaria. One must therefore assume
that the equation of forty denarii with one solidus was still accepted among
the Salian Franks in the third quarter of the fifth century. The implication
is that both the Salic Law and the Code of Euric, to which we shall come
later, belong to about a generation after the Theodosian Code and were
perhaps, in some sense, local responses to that great compilation.
Furthermore, there is no reason to suppose, as has been the near-universal
64 This is not Ewig’s view; he retains the date given to the conversion by Gregory of Tours.
65 Epist. Austras. ed. Gundlach, no. 2, in Epistolae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi, MGH (Berlin, 1892),
p. 113. 66 ‘Iustitia ex ore vestro procedat . . . praetorium tuum omnibus pateatur.’
67 Greg. Tur. Hist. ii.18–19.
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