Up to this time, as we have seen, the murderer _with all his possessions_ was by law to remain the slave of the parentes, or the next heirs of the murdered person, except in the one case of the murderer having children by another wife. Thenceforth, if the murderer, according to the edict, had children or wife free from participation in the crime, he alone was to be delivered up to the parentes or next heirs of the dead. His possessions were not to go to them, but to the children or heirs of the _criminal_, on the ground that the punishment should in justice fall alone upon the sinner, and not upon his innocent family. Clearly the last tie of tribal instinct securing the solidarity of kindreds was now broken. It had lost its ancient significance. Murder had become the crime of an individual against the State, and a matter of criminal law. The only survival of tribal feeling seems to have been that, as some compensation to the family of the murdered man, the murderer whose life the Church had saved was to become their slave. [Illustration] CHAPTER VI. _TRIBAL CUSTOMS OF THE FRANKS AND OF THE TRIBES CONQUERED BY THE MEROVINGIAN KINGS._ I. THE WERGELDS OF THE LEX SALICA. In turning now to the Lex Salica the inquiry will again at first more or less be a study of wergelds. There are many difficult points in the construction of the Lex Salica, and the capitularies connected with it, which, after all the learned labour expended upon them, still remain unsettled. To attempt to discuss them fully would involve an amount of research and erudition to which this essay can lay no claim. All that can be attempted in this survey of the traces of tribal custom in the laws of the Continental tribes is to approach their text afresh in the light of the Cymric evidence, as a tentative first step towards, at last, approaching the Anglo-Saxon laws from the same tribal point of view and from the vantage-ground of a previous study of the survivals of tribal custom elsewhere. [Sidenote: The district within which the Lex Salica had force.] The Lex Salica had force apparently at first over the Franks of the district extending from the _Carbonaria Silva_ on the left bank of the Meuse to the River Loire. [Sidenote: The first sixty-five chapters about A.D. 500, but with later alterations.] The earliest manuscripts of the Lex Salica are considered to belong to the late eighth or early ninth century. And the general opinion seems to be that the first sixty-five chapters may be ascribed to the time of Clovis, or at least to a period before Christianity had become general among the Franks. The reign of Clovis extended from A.D. 481 to 511, and may perhaps be taken as covering the date when the sixty-five chapters were first framed. There is, however, no proof that they were not modified afterwards. For at the end of the celebrated chapter _De chrenecruda_ there is a clause in a later manuscript which implies that it was no longer in force.[98]