weight into the scales on the side of composition and settlement’.^54 In
a ‘civil war’ that arose at Tours in 585 it was rather, Gregory tells us,
the communal authorities—he himself as bishop, ‘the judge’ (pre-
sumably the count), and a body of judiceswho took action, arranging
a settlement against the letter of the law (for one party had committed
widespread arson) in order to restore peace. The ‘altercation’ came to
an end when the Church provided the composition-money, and both
sides swore to make no further trouble.^55
The Germanic name for a plea before one of these local courts was
‘Ding’ or ‘thing’, which like Latin reshad the general meaning of ‘any
discrete object, matter or event’, and as one of its earliest specialized
meanings, ‘a public or legal matter’. In early Lombardy, thingatiowas
the term for bringing a lawsuit;^56 and in the Germanic form of the
oath sworn at Strasbourg in 843, Lewis the German and Charles the
Bald undertook not to join in any thing(= plaid, plea, in the West
Frankish version) with their brother Lothar, to the other’s damage.^57 In
England, the ‘thing’ as a legal hearing was already associated with
a public assembly (medle) in seventh-century Kentish laws,^58 and
probably local gatherings of this sort were the true soil for the growth
of a legal culture throughout Western Europe. We just know so much
less about them because they did not deal with the disputes of the
magnates about landholding or therefore produce the noticiaewhich
were preserved by churches as title-deeds.^59 The Vikings brought with
them a more definite concept of the thingas a court with a known
location, signified by place-names like ‘Dingwall’ in Scotland and
‘Thingwall’ in areas of Norse colonization in North-West England.^60
The example of the eight and a half hundreds taking their pleas to
Thingoein Suffolk, which were granted as a unit to the monastery of
Bury St. Edmunds by Edward the Confessor, suggests that these com-
munal gatherings lie at the root of the system of shire and hundred
courts established by the English kings in the tenth century, which
provided the basic structure of local government in England.^61 From
Celtic Scotland there is evidence of legal assemblies predating the
Keeping the peace 23(^54) Wallace-Hadrill, The Long-Haired Kings, 124, 142.
(^55) Gregory of Tours, Libri Historiarum X, 366–8, 519–20 (VII. 47, X. 27).
(^56) For the range of meanings of thingin Anglo-Saxon, see Liebermann, Die Gesetze der
Angelsachsen, ii. 222–3, 449–50.
(^57) Capitularia, ii. 172. 20.
(^58) Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, i. 10 (8), ii. 449–50.
(^59) Though the Formulae(88–9, 156, 230–1) do contain noticiaeof homicide cases which
record security given by the kinsmen not to pursue the feud; it was perhaps as important to
preserve these as it was land-charters.
(^60) E. Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, 4th edn. (Oxford
UP, 1960), 465–6.
(^61) F. E. Harmer, Anglo-Saxon Writs(Manchester UP, 1952), 145, 154–5, 437.