The king was no longer elected by his people, for his office had become hereditary in the House of Meroveus, one of the heroes of the race. No woman, even of the Merovingian line, might succeed to the throne, nor prince whose hair had been shorn, since with the Franks flowing locks were a sign of royalty. Yet, in spite of the king’s new position, the old spirit of equality had not entirely disappeared. The assembly of freemen, still held once a year, had degenerated into a military review: but the warriors thus collected could demand that the coming campaign should meet with their approval. When a battle was over and victory obtained, the lion’s share of the booty did not fall to the king, but the whole was divided by lot. A great part of the Salic law was really a tariff of violent acts, with the fine that those who had committed them must pay, so much for shooting a poisoned arrow, even if it missed its mark; so much for wounding another in the head, or for cutting off his nose, or his great toe, or, worst of all, for damaging his second finger, so that he could no longer draw the bowstring. The underlying principle of this code was different from that of the Roman law, which set up a certain standard of right, inflicting penalties on those who fell short of it. Thus the Roman citizen who murdered or maimed his neighbour would be punished because he had dared to do what the state condemned as a crime. The Frank, in a similar case, would be fined by the judges of his tribe, and the money paid as compensation to the person, or the relations of the person, whom he had wronged: the idea being, not to appease the anger of the state, but to remove the resentment of the injured party. For this purpose each Frank had his _wergeld_, literally his ‘worth-gold’ or the sum of money at which, according to his rank, his life was valued, beginning with the nobles of the king’s palace and descending in a scale to the lowest freeman. When the Franks left Belgium and advanced, conquering, into northern Gaul, they also fixed _wergelds_ for their Roman subjects; but rated them at only half the value of their own race. The _wergeld_ of a Frankish freeman was two hundred gold pieces, of a Roman only one hundred. By the beginning of the sixth century, when the Franks were well established in Gaul, the management of their important tribal affairs had passed entirely into the hands of the nobles surrounding the king. These bore such titles as _Major Domus_ or ‘Mayor of the Palace’, at first only a steward, but later the chief minister of the crown; the ‘Seneschal’ or head of the royal household; the ‘Marshal’ or Master of the Stables; the ‘Chamberlain’ or chief servant of the bedchamber. [Sidenote: Clovis, King of the Franks]