These capitularies were not intended to supersede national or tribal custom and law. Each man was judged according to the laws of his own people, and in 802 the Emperor directed that the unwritten laws of the peoples under his rule should be collected. The capitularies were, therefore, supplemental and corrective to the national codes. For example, one of them, which, by the way, met such strong opposition that the Emperor was obliged to yield the point, was intended to remove the abuse of private vengeance. Local administration was in the hands of the counts, and, as in the Merovingian period, the administrative unit was the county. Altogether throughout the whole Empire, there were three hundred counts; the districts which they administered varied in size, the authority exercised by them being judicial, military, and financial. Along with the count and closely associated with him is the bishop. As there was in the capitularies so much which concerned the sphere of the Church, the coöperation, in their official publication, of the bishop with the count was not unnatural. Moreover, in the Empire, in addition to purely religious duties, the bishop had the function of investigating certain categories of crime, homicides, incest, etc., and in a general way, he acted as adviser of the count. Among the count’s duties was that of defending the Church and, in trials for ecclesiastical offenses, he had to be present informally as assessor. The coöperation of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities strongly appealed to the Emperor, with his ideals of a Christian commonwealth; but in experience, the association of the bishop and the count, as local administrators, worked far from smoothly. So a capitulary of 801 mentions the Emperor’s purpose to find out the reasons why bishops and abbots, on the one hand, and counts, on the other, are not able to assist one another. The problem of defining the limits of the secular and religious spheres gave rise to constant difficulties, and the situation was further aggravated by the fact that in many cases the counts seemed inefficient and venal. They had to be warned not to hang offenders without trial, to be sober when they were sitting in judgment, not to receive presents, not to oppress freemen, not to usurp the right which belonged to the state, not to take the goods of the poor. Once a year the counts were summoned to the royal palace, and they were required to remain there long enough to lay before the Emperor a detailed record of their administration.