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452 16. state, lordship and community in the west
which stood a much larger body of unwritten customary law. References to
law – lex/leges – in actual cases from seventh-century Gaul suggest the same.
Legal authority was held to reside in local men learned in Frankish law (the
so-called rachinburgii ), rather than in a centrally controlled system of courts
and justice. 50 Little is known of early Anglo-Saxon systems, but it seems
unlikely that they more resembled the Gothic and Lombard kingdoms than
the Frankish. Even so, written law does seem to have been used north of
the Channel to push through Christianization. 51
Indeed, even where central legal structures were much less developed,
there could still be one important sense in which the kingdom might function
as a legal community. Of this, some late Merovingian placita – documents
recording the final settlement of particular cases – provide an
excellent illustration. On a series of occasions in the later seventh century,
substantial numbers of secular and ecclesiastical magnates gathered at the
royal court to witness disputes between two or more of their number. The
king convened the case, the assembly of magnates helped him judge it, and
all put their names to the final settlement. For the case of the orphan
Ingramnus against Amalbert in February 692 or 693, for instance, some
twelve bishops and another forty secular magnates (together with many
unnamed followers) gathered at the court of Clovis III. 52 Many of these
magnates may have run their own localities like mafia bosses, but the fact
that disputes between their number were fought out before their peer
group, in a meeting convened by the king, guaranteed a real sense of legal
community within the realm.
4. Involvement, identity and ethnicity
The Roman inheritance in law and religion thus provided an ideological
justification for some sense of community at the highest level in the new
states of western Europe. More important, the pursuit and presentation of
these ideologies generated a series of occasions and modes of behaviour
which allowed the kingdoms’ constituent landowning élites to function in
reality as a single body. Would-be bishops and counts had to make themselves
known, whatever their familial background, to their kings; kings convened
more or less regular assemblies of secular and religious magnates; and the
great of the kingdom might gather under the chairmanship of the king to
settle their disputes. All of these activities led substantial numbers of the élite
of any kingdom to meet and, in certain cases, to act as one body. Such occasions
provided a real social cement for the new kingdoms – the moments
when ties were forged between members of their landowning élites.
50 Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms ch. 7; Wood (1986).
51 Cf. Wormald (1977); modified now by Wormald (1995).
52 Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms 262–3; cf. Fouracre (1986).
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