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the community of the realm 451
with the Lex Salica of the Franks providing an interesting variant. Its earliest
preface mentions no king and credits its production to four wise lawgivers,
although later versions and modificatory edicts revert to a more
traditional style, and emphasize again the co-operation of king and great
men. 45
In some cases, rhetoric was matched by public ceremonial. Different
seventh-century revisions of the Visigothic legal code (the Forum Iudicum)
were presented by the reigning king to various of the periodic public
assemblies of the great religious and secular magnates of the Spanish
kingdom which gathered at Toledo. 46 The Liber Constitutionum of the
Burgundians, similarly, has a Preface sealed by more than thirty comites –
leading lay magnates – of the kingdom. We must surely imagine a formal
signing, or rather sealing, ceremony conducted at the Burgundian court
when the text was first promulgated. In the Frankish kingdom, likewise, the
three surviving edicts of Childebert (dated 1 March 594, 595 and 596) were
all presented at assemblies, and those of Guntramn (585) and Chlothar
(614) published in the aftermath of church councils. 47
Written law was thus an expression of divinely ordained order and consensus,
and its rhetoric and ceremonial presentation stressed its role in generating
a sense of community within the different kingdoms. The degree to
which practical legal structures (courts, judges, etc.) provided a further
social cement, making successor states actual legal communities in the
everyday practice of dispute settlement, is harder to estimate. In some
cases, a unified structure of real importance was created. The Visigothic
Code was regularly updated to incorporate new royal rulings. The text itself
was required to be used; cases it failed to cover were to be referred to the
king; and there existed a network of royally certified courts and royally
appointed judges. The Islamic conquest of the kingdom means that no preeighth-century
charters survive to confirm that the text’s demands were
being fulfilled, but its prescriptions were followed very closely in the
Carolingian period – the first moment we can check. 48 In Italy, likewise, a
similar royally authorized network of courts operated in the Ostrogothic
kingdom of the sixth century, and the Lombard kingdom developed comparable
structures in the later seventh and eighth century. 49
North of the Alps and Pyrenees, the pattern is not so clear. Frankish and
Anglo-Saxon kings issued law codes and modificatory edicts, but it is
unclear whether these were part of a coherent, centrally directed legal structure.
References in both Frankish law codes – Lex Salica and Lex Ribuaria –
imply that these texts were originally viewed as partial collections, behind
45 On all these texts, see further ch. 10 (Charles-Edwards), pp. 260,87 above.
46 Cf. Collins (1983a) 24ff. 47 Cf. Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms,ch.7.
48 Structure: Wormald (1977); King (1972); Collins (1983a) 24ff. Law in practice: Collins (1985) and
(1986). 49 Ostrogothic Italy: Moorhead (1992) 75ff. Lombards: Wickham (1986).
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