liberty of churches to enjoy their property ‘in right and lordship... for
all time... doing with it what they should freely decide was for their
profit’.^31 But at the same time, royal charters defined the constitutional
authority of the ruler, and also the governmental functions of his house-
hold from which the charters proceeded and where disputes about them
were settled.
By the formulation of the indiculaordering the hearing of cases—
simply a special variety of the business letters used by the clergy and
nobility generally—the Merovingian palace replaced the municipal
curiaas the place where property transactions were registered and
enforced. The first pleas (placita) of which we have record are a series
of land-cases which came to the palatiumfor arbitration because they
mostly concerned churches towards which the king had a special
responsibility, and because there existed in the royal court the begin-
nings of an administration which could give written instructions to local
agents. A placitumwas originally no more than a meeting consented to
by the parties to a dispute and designed to reach a conclusion which
‘pleased’ them.^32 One of the principal functions of great men has always
been to keep the peace by arbitrating in the disputes of their social
dependants.^33 Arbitration changed into adjudication as the ‘plea’
assumed the form of an appeal to the great man’s authority: what
pleased the noble or royal arbiter came to be regarded as a legal
decision to be enforced on the disputants, and judging was seen as
the allocation of rights to the ‘winner’ and obligations or guilt to the
defeated party.
The royal charters recording pleas in the Merovingian palace are a
variety of noticiae, the documents notifying the conclusions of placitaof
which there are many examples in the formularies. These were the
‘agreements of peace’ reached in civitasor pagusbefore counts or
abbots and assemblies of ‘good men’, which the parties to the disputes
accepted and bound themselves to carry out. The subjects of disputes
18 Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Justice
(^31) Formulae, 291–2 (nos. 5, 6).
(^32) Ibid. 108, 118, 122, 346. 30 , 594–5 (= the legal ‘will’ of an individual), 407. 1 (placuit
inter nos); cf. Lex Salica, ed. K. A. Eckhardt, MGH Leges nationum Germanicarum (Hanover,
1969), pt. 1, p. 192, for a loan or contract as a legitimum placitum; Gregory of Tours, Libri
Historiarum X, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum 1 (i),
(Hanover, 1937–51), 252. 15 (V. 44); ibid. 72. 10 , 91. 5 , 122. 1 , 487. 10 (what pleases, or is the
will of.. .); ibid. 39. 10 , 304. 15 , 329. 1 , 486. 15 (mutual will, promise, agreement); ibid. 334.10
and 20, 521.1 (assemblies called by kings); ibid. 201. 20 , 237. 5 343. 20 , 344. 1 , 366. 20 , 367. 1 ,
386–7 (‘legal’ hearings and judgments in the king’s court);
J. F. Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus(Leiden, 1954–76), s.v. placitare, placitus;
P. Fouracre, ‘ “Placita” and the settlement of disputes in later Merovingian Francia’, in The
Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Davies and Fouracre.
(^33) Cf. Carole Rawcliffe, ‘The Great Lord as Peacekeeper: Arbitration by English Noblemen
and their Councils in the Later Middle Ages’, in Law and Social Change in British History, ed.
J. A. Guy and H. G. Beale (London: Royal Historical Society, 1984), 34–54.