compensation. Charlemagne and Louis the Pious tried to compel the
peaceful settlement of feuds and to keep apart kinsmen who would not
give or receive compensation. At the same time the feud was being
replaced in a more fundamental way by the prescription of death, with
no possibility of redemption, for perpetrators of treason, rape, and
killing ‘without cause’. It was still necessary to forbid feuds against
officials who killed thieves.^125
‘The state of the realm’
The practical application of the royal law-giving of the Franks and
Anglo-Saxons, and the effectiveness of their legal order should not be
exaggerated. As Patrick Wormald argues, the ancient law-codes of
the Frankish people were largely ‘inert symbols’ of their empire and
historical identity, and the erratically preserved Anglo-Saxon ‘legis-
lation’, waxing and waning with the ‘imperial consciousness’ of English
kings, was never cited in the legal hearings of which we have record. In
law-codes was a nation’s history: the structure of a ‘state’ was to be
found in the institutions and procedures by which the king did justice to
his people, and the first expressions of ideas about the state of the king-
dom are in royal charters and the administrative orders such as are
gathered in Frankish capitularies.^126
From Merovingian times kings granted lands and immunities to
churchmen to reside upon ‘in quiet order’, praying for ‘the stability of
the realm’.^127 And, as the Church proclaimed at the Council of Paris in
829, ‘equitable judgments established the realm and injustice over-
turned it’: per iustitiam stet regnum.^128 It was surely churchmen who
first used the Roman lawyer’s statusas a synonym for stabilitas, and
translated status reipublicae(‘the state of the republic’), which for
Cicero had been contained chiefly in the decisions of its courts, into
regni pax et status.^129 In 761, Pope Paul I founded a monastery in
memory of two of his predecessors, where prayers were to be said for
the ‘extension and stability of the commonwealth [rei publicae] and also
the salvation of all faithful Christians’; and at about the same time the
bishop of Bourges ordered the tithing of his servants, ‘for the sake of the
38 Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Justice
(^125) Formulae, 22, 60–1; Capitularia, i. 16 (4, 5), 51 (21, 22), 70 (31), 72 (9), 97 (32),
104 (42), 148 (1, 2), 201 (4), 217 (7), 284 (13), 290 (12); ii. 107 (1), 272 (5), 336 (10), 343–4
(3).
(^126) Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, 45, 49, 417.
(^127) Diplomata... Merowingica, 29. 14 ; Formulae, 46. 20 , 171. 25 , 200. 25.
(^128) Concilia Aevi Karolini, I (i), 654.
(^129) Ibid., I (i), 67. 9 ; Formulae, 421. 29 and note (e); Cicero, De Republica, 1. 25. 38, and
Oratio pro Sulla, 22, 63.