mayor of the palace would adjourn the court till the oath could be taken
or the ordeal administered, and a case might therefore have to pass
through a number of hearings, weeks apart. In 809, Charlemagne
ordered that oaths decided upon in the palace-court should be com-
pleted there, and that recalcitrant oath-helpers should be commanded to
attend by royal indiculumand seal.^44 To keep track of the stages of a
plea, the noticiahad to expand from a note of the judgment into a full
record of court proceedings, and that must be why it was not subscribed
by the king, though in form it had much in common with a royal
precept.^45
In this way, the Frankish royal palace took from the late Roman
municipality the functions and the name of a curia. The archetypal
court was the curia regis, the gathering in which land was formally
granted by the king or resigned back into his hands, and disputes settled
between the king’s tenants-in-chief. That is to put the matter in feudal
terms, strictly anachronistic for the Frankish period, but it is clear that
the supervision of land-holding was a basic concern of the royal palace
from the beginning. Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims, describing
Frankish household government in 882 in his De Ordine Palatii, was
the first we know to have used the word curiaeof formally constituted
assemblies of clergy or laity, which were gathered in the palace to con-
sider matters ‘pertaining to the general safety of the king and kingdom’,
but also to deal with individual legal cases which the count of the palace
or others could not settle.^46 It was another two centuries before the
Papal curiawas so-called, by which time the word was regularly used of
the king’s court when placitain an obviously legal sense were being
heard.^47
To give this term ‘court’ its full meaning as an institution—signifying
both the place where judicial business was handled and the judges who
sat there to transact it—another word interacted with curia. This other
word, curtis, was derived from the cohorsof classical Latin, which
meant primarily ‘an enclosed place’ and secondarily ‘the multitude
enclosed’ (and so ‘a company of soldiers’). In the barbarian period its
basic meaning was a farmstead or manor, especially a royal manor.^48
Pleas before the king 21(^44) Diplomata... Merowingica, no. 78; Capitularia, i. 149. 20.
(^45) Tessier, Diplomatique, 37.
(^46) Hinkmar von Rheims, De ordine palatii, ed. T. Gross and R. Schieffer, MGH Fontes Iuris
Germanici Antiqui 3 (Hanover, 1980), 90 (c. 33), 94 (c. 35).
(^47) Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis lexicon minus, and Dictionary of Medieval Latin from
British Sources, prepared by R. E. Latham (London: Oxford UP for the British Academy:
1981), s.v. curia.
(^48) C. T. Lewis and C. Short, Latin Dictionary(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), s.v. cohors;
Lexicon Latinitatis Medii Aevi, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (Turnhout,
1975), s.v. cortis; Niermeyer, lexicon minus, s.v. curtis, 11, 17; Latham, Dictionary, s.v. cors,
2b.