royal palace.^67 At the end of a hearing in the king’s court, an order
(indiculum de iudicio evindicato) would go to the count to execute the
judgment against his pagensisaccording to the local law on the matter
(lex loci vestri de tali causa).^68 A legal system, binding together a
hierarchy of courts, began with the marrying of the local tribunals
dominated by the counts to a royal jurisdiction over land-grants—a
jurisdiction which operated by means of written precepts to the count
which called for at least preliminary hearings in the mallus. The same
process can be documented in late Anglo-Saxon England: the king
would send a writ to the bishop, the earl, and the sheriff and all the
thegns of a particular shire, notifying them of a grant he had made and
commanding them to pronounce judgment in the shire-meeting on those
who had infringed it.^69
A law of personal injuries enforced in public courts began, like the
land law, from the political protection which the king granted to a
privileged few. Special protections for individuals continued to be
sought and granted for many centuries to come, but at a very early stage
kings took the decisive step of extending their protection to whole
groups of those whom they would eventually call their ‘subjects’. Soon
after his imperial coronation in 800, Charlemagne sent out pairs of
missi—Bishop Magenardus and Count Madelgaudus for the area
between Rouen and Le Mans, for instance—to enforce a set of laws
throughout his realm. The missiwere to see especially that laymen
observed his orders in cases concerning the protection of churches and
of widows, orphans, and the powerless (minus potentium); forbidding
rapine; and enforcing military service—the matters under the ruler’s
special jurisdiction (bannum). Peace was enjoined ‘from all men’ for
those qui in mundeburde domni imperatoris sunt.^70
Frankish rulers took from the Romans, through the mediation of the
Church, a concept of ‘peace and concord’ which could give an ideo-
logical basis to a jurisdiction which they were extending by pragmatic
acts of protection. But the measure of the growth of peace-keeping
26 Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Justice
(^67) F. N. Estey, ‘The Meaning of Placitumand Mallusin the Capitularies’, Speculum, 22
(1947), 435–9.
(^68) Formulae, 59–60 (nos. 27, 28); Brunner, Die Entstehung der Schwurgerichte, 80–3,
where the indiculus de iudicio evindicatois compared to the writ ordering the sheriff to put
the victorious party in seisin in Glanvill, I. 17 (ed. Hall, p. 11): an example is Diplomata...
Merowingica, no. 60 (p. 54).
(^69) Harmer, Anglo-Saxon Writs, 159–60 (Bury St. Edmunds 17), 181–4 (Christ Church,
Canterbury, 26, 28); Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. and tr. A. J. Robertson (Cambridge UP,
1939), 137–9; reproduced in A. Harding, The Law Courts of Medieval England(London and
New York, 1973), 130–2.
(^70) Capitularia, i. 98, 101, 104, 146, 214: translations in H. R. Loyn and J. Percival, The
Reign of Charlemagne(London, 1975), 79–81; commentary in F.-L. Ganshof, The Caro-
lingians and the Frankish Monarchy, tr. Janet Sondheimer (London, 1971), 62, 79, 93.