Charlemagne made grants in ‘the royal court’ (curte, or curta regali),
and Asser speaks of King Alfred as brought up in regio curto. By about
925, curiahad been so influenced by curtathat in England it could be
defined as a domus concilii(council-house), which Aelfric’s glossary
soon afterwards interpreted as domhus(‘doom-’ or ‘judgment-house’).^49
On the other hand, curta(the enclosure) was conflated with curia(the
people who might assemble within it) to the extent that its dominant
meaning became ‘law-court’: by 880, it might signify a place where
public pleas were heard, and by 1000 one where a bishop exercised his
jurisdiction (generali cortis meae judicio).^50 This semantic development
can have occurred only because the hearing of pleas was the essential
activity in the courts of the great lords, whether these were the king him-
self and his barons or the rulers of the Church.
Keeping the peace
The purpose of law courts was to maintain social peace by settling
disputes. The king’s court had no monopoly of judicial functions
beyond the adjudication of the land-cases of the greater churches. The
local community strove to keep the peace for itself rather as Tacitus had
described,^51 the landlords exerting their power to settle the disputes of
their tenants and dependents under the guidance of judiceswho knew
the customary procedures. The chief subject-matter of this jurisdiction
was not landholding by charter but feuding and blood-vengeance and
all the violent disturbance of the peace which that entailed. ‘Leading
men must settle feuds.. .’, said a law of the tenth-century English
King Edmund.^52 One of the finest pieces of medieval literature, the
thirteenth-century Njal’s Saga, tells how a chieftain skilled in arbitration
between feuding kinsmen attempted to bring law to tenth-century
Iceland.^53 The obligation to avenge the killing of kinsmen, which con-
stitutes a threat to the integrity of the whole kin, is a founding principle
of all societies, and systems of criminal law have not replaced the feud
so much as diverted its energies into public forms, leading to con-
clusions acceptable to the wider community. At the first stage of the
process ‘stands the local court of arbitration... ready to throw [its]
22 Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Justice
(^49) Formulae, 396. 30 and 45 , 399. 30 , 426. 35 ; Diplomata... Merowingica, 27. 40 ; D. Du
Cange, Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis, s.v. cortis(4).
(^50) Latham, Dictionary, s.v. curia1a.
(^51) Formulae, 88–9, 156, 230–1, for noticiaerecording the giving of security by kinsmen not
to pursue a feud.
(^52) Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, i. 189 (II Eadmund, 7); cf. Capitularia, ii.
172.20.
(^53) Njal’s Saga, tr. M. Magnusson and H. Palsson (Harmondsworth: Penguin classics, 1960),
esp. 159, 175, 208–9.