kings. In July 917, Charles III renewed the privileges, twice destroyed
with the monastery itself, of the church founded by his grandfather in
the palace at Compiègne: anyone who violated the statutes which the
emperor Charles the Bald had established (stabilivit) should burn in hell
with Judas, the betrayer of our Lord.^138 The prayers of beneficiaries
were required first of all for the salvation of the souls and ‘royal
majesty’ of the king who made these statutes, his predecessors and
successors, and only secondly for the establishment (stabilimentum) of
church and kingdom. The ‘state of the king’ was already anticipated
in the spiritual health and authority of the ruler, on which the now
commonplace ‘state of the kingdom’ was seen to rest.^139
Just before his death in 882, Hincmar, the old councillor of the
Emperor Charles the Bald and archbishop of Rheims for thirty-six
years, addressed to his fellow bishops and King Carloman a tract on ‘the
government of the palace’ (De ordine palatii). Hincmar had lived
through the troubles of Louis the Pious’s reign, the division of the realm
after his death, and the attacks of the Vikings, but he still gave an
idealized picture of Carolingian government. The ordering of the
members of the palace—the king’s family, the steward, butler, and
constable, the pages and the vassals—is in fact only one part of it: the
other part concerns the preservation of the state of the whole kingdom
(totius regni status). To consider this, two placitaare said to be held
annually, the first a general assembly ordering the state of the kingdom
for the immediate year (its ordinatumnot to be changed except for some
great necessity), the second a meeting of leading councillors only, to
take thought for future years, the prospects for war or peace, and the
deployment of the marchioneswith responsibility for frontier areas.
There was no consideration of the pleas of individuals before matters
concerning the safety or state of the king and the kingdom generally
(quae generaliter ad salutem vel statum regis et regni pertinebant) had
been ordered.^140
As much as allegiance to a traditional order, expressions of concern
for ‘the state of the kingdom’ indicate fear for a country’s future, and its
ability to withstand military threats. But it is hard to see how that ‘state’
could have been imagined in the first place without the structure of
courts and procedures created by the Frankish kings over the centuries
‘The state of the realm’ 41(^138) Karoli III Diplomata, 202; cf. 66. 18 , 89. 28 , 122. 9 , 149. 11 and 20 , 304. 31 ; also
Formulae, 351. 8 , 352. 27 , 590. 33.
(^139) Karoli III Diplomata, 28. 7 , 33. 18 , 48. 6 , 53. 21 , 60. 13 , 68. 19 , 70. 24 , 82. 5 , 90. 10 , 146.4,
151 .7, 153.17, 166. 3 , 171. 7 and 30 , 176. 1 , 183. 15 , 187.3, 194. 9 , 265. 5 , 275. 16 , 302.23.
(^140) Hinkmar von Rheims, De ordine palatii, ed. T. Gross and R. Schieffer, MGH Fontes
Iuris Germanici Antiqui 3 (Hanover, 1980), 54, 56, 74, 82–90 (caps. 12, 13, 23, 28, 29–33;
Janet Nelson, ‘Kingship and Royal Government’, ch. 15 of The New Cambridge Medieval
History, ii. c.700–c.900, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge UP, 1995), 420, 425–6.