The count’s tribunal was called the _Mallus_. He sat in company with a few assessors, chosen from the chief men of the district. These magnates were called _Rachimburgi_, or _Boni Homines_. They were summoned by the count, and had no authority independent of his, but by ancient custom—both Roman and Teutonic—assessors had always been called in to aid the chief judge. The system is found alike at the tribunal of the Roman provincial magistrate presiding in his _conventus_, and in the primitive German law courts described by Tacitus. The count, sitting in his _Mallus_, had full power of life and death, and authority in all cases, save where the persons concerned were so great that the case might be called before the King’s High Court, and tried by the king himself and the _Comes Palatinus_. The Franks not unfrequently enforced the death penalty for murder, arson, brigandage, and other great crimes. But they used also the system of _weregeld_, like our own Anglo-Saxon forefathers. With the consent of the family of the victim, almost every murder could be condoned on the payment of sums varying from 30 gold solidi for a slave to 1800 for a freeman of high rank. [Sidenote: Weregeld.] In cases when the proof of a crime was difficult on the evidence produced, the Franks often made use of oaths and compurgations. The accused for himself, or a body of his supporters in his behalf, made a solemn oath that he was innocent, and this sufficed to acquit him if no further evidence was produced. Judicial combats were also not unfrequent. They appear among the Burgundians, however, before they were taken up by the Franks. Nor was the custom unknown of submitting criminals whose conviction was difficult to the ordeal: that by boiling water, where the accused plunged his hand into a caldron, was the one most frequently used. It will be noticed that there was no trace of popular government in this Frankish administration. The king chose the count and the count the hundred-man. The king was not controlled or checked by any popular assembly of the nation, nor the count or hundred-man by any meeting of the people of his district. The king promulgated edicts and laws on his own responsibility, and similarly the count administered his countship without any thought of rendering account to any one save the king. Such assemblies as took place were summoned to hear the decisions of king or count, not to debate upon them, or recommend their modification. The ancient German freedom had disappeared, to give place to an autocracy as well defined as that of the vanished Roman empire.