Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

280 10. law in the western kingdoms
threaten when the men of Orleans took up arms to wreak vengeance upon
their attackers; but then the counts on both sides intervened and imposed
a peace ‘until the hearing, that is, so that, on the day on which judgement
should be given, the side that had unjustly resorted to force against the
other should pay compensation, justice mediating between them. And thus
there was an end of the war.’
This, then, was a little war, not the night-time thief envisaged by the
Pactus pro Tenore Pacis but whole civitates resorting to plundering their neighbours’
goods. And, since whole civitates were in action, the counts of those
civitates rather than any mere centenarii were required to put an end to the
trouble. Yet it is in many respects the same world as the Pactus. Men follow
the tracks of the livestock, not just across civitas boundaries but out of what
had been Chiliperic’s kingdom into Guntram’s. More strikingly still, the
death of a king and the uncertainty about who would succeed to his authority
around Paris permitted a major outbreak of violence which had been
repressed while he was alive. The king might be killed by the assassins’
knives at Chelles, but while Chilperic still lived his capacity to repress violence
was a very real social force. Nor was it treated simply as an outbreak
of vengeance by the dead king’s victims on those who had been his subjects:
both counts took the line that the men of Orleans and Blois, who had
started the affair, should pay compensation, and yet they were Guntram’s
subjects who had, in 583, probably suffered from the men of Châteaudun.
Peace had been re-established after the war of 583 and the men of Orleans
and Blois were not entitled to stir up old grievances.
From further west, in Brittany, comes a short text in two recensions,
plausibly dated by Fleuriot to the sixth century but which could be of the
seventh or even perhaps the eighth century. 90 One of the recensions is entitled
‘Excerpts from Laws of the Romans and the Franks’; the authenticity
of this title and the truth of the claim it embodies are both difficult to substantiate;
but in form it is much closer to the additions to Lex Salica (other
than the overtly royal Pactus pro Tenore Pacis and Decretio Childeberti ) than it
is to Irish or, later, Welsh law. It looks as though it may be the product of
some local assembly which took upon itself legislative authority; it is a valuable
reminder of what might be happening in an independently-minded
province under intermittent Frankish hegemony.
The Formulae Andegavenses of c. 600 similarly give a clue, of a rather
different kind, to what was happening on the ground. 91 In many ways this
was a very Roman world, a civitas still retaining its Gesta, the record of
official transactions. Legal acts were not just remembered by a court, as
90 The so-called Canones Wallici, ed. Bieler (1963) 136–59; Fleuriot (1971); Dumville (1984) is sceptical
about the sixth-century dating.
91 Zeumer (1886) 4–25; on pp. 2–3 Zeumer shows that real documents were used as models for this
collection.
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