Indeed, to all these Teutons and to the Roman provincials as well, it
seemed as a matter of course that tribal or local laws should be permitted
to endure among the peoples they belonged to. These assumptions and the
conditions of the growing Frankish Empire evoked, as it were, a more acute
mobilization of the principle that to each people belonged its law. For
provincials and Teuton peoples were mingling throughout the Frankish
realm, and the first obvious solution of the legal problems arising was to
hold that provincials and Teutons everywhere should remain amenable and
entitled to their own law, which was assumed to attend them as a personal
appurtenance. Of course this solution became intolerable as tribal blood
and delimitations were obscured, and men moved about through the
territories of one great realm. Archbishop Agobard of Lyons remarks that
one might see five men sitting together, each amenable to a different
law.[369] The escape from this legal confusion was to revert to the idea
of law and custom as applying to every one within a given territory. The
personal principle gradually gave way to this conception in the course of
the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries.[370] In the meanwhile during the
Merovingian, and more potently in the Carolingian period, king’s law, as
distinguished from people’s law, had been an influence making for legal
uniformity throughout that wide conglomerate empire which acknowledged the
authority of the Frankish king or emperor. The king’s law might emanate
from the delegated authority, and arise from the practices, of royal
functionaries; it was most formally promulgated in Capitularies, which
with Charlemagne reach such volume and importance. Some of these royal
ordinances related to a town or district only. Others were for the realm,
and the latter not only were instances of law applying universally, but
also tended to promote, or suggest, the harmonizing of laws which they did
not modify directly.
III
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