appearance of sheriffdoms, with which judicesand ‘dempsters’ may
have been associated.^62
Those who gave judgment in the first courts, whether they were
called ‘elders’, ‘doomsters’, ‘lawmen’, or ‘judges’,^63 derived their
authority from landholding, and if the landlord was also a churchman,
his obligation to settle disputes and pacify feuds was the greater. The
Church brought the ideal of divine justice into the workings of the local
courts, but the physical sanctions were wielded by the counts. It might
be by the moral pressure of priests and nobles (sacerdotes et magnifici
viri) that the parties to a feud were restored to ‘peace and concord’,
one side accepting compensation from the other and giving a written
assurance that the killing of a brother should never be raised again in
court or otherwise (this is the securitas pro homicidioin the ‘private’
section of Marculf’s formulary).^64 But it was the power of enforcement
possessed by the count and his subordinates which gave such arrange-
ments reliability. The authority of the ordinary public court of Frankish
Gaul, the mallus, and of the public moot in Anglo-Saxon England, was
compounded in equal measure of the moral force of the Church and
local community and the physical power of secular officials: the counts
and the vicars who acted for them, and in England the eorldermen,
shire-reeves and hundred-reeves.
The Franks took the count (comes), the official around whom terri-
torial administration in the West was to be constructed, from the
government of the late Roman empire. The comitesor ‘companions’
were originally those who accompanied the princepson his journeys. As
military leaders they were for long subordinate to the dukes, another
late Roman institution. It was when the dukes (rather like the Anglo-
Saxon ealdormen some centuries later) showed signs of making them-
selves independent territorial princes that the counts (like the English
sheriffs) came to the fore as the king’s local agents for military, fiscal,
and judicial business. In the course of centuries, the dominant meaning
of comitatusshifted all the way from the emperor’s entourage and
the ‘central government’ of the empire to the office of the count, his
‘county’, and the county court. The comitatus and the episcopatus,
the territorial jurisdictions of count and bishop, were seen as the twin
institutions on which the administration of justice in the countryside
rested.^65
24 Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Justice
(^62) G. W. S. Barrow, The Kingdom of the Scots(London, 1973), 70; and ‘Popular Courts in
Early Medieval Scotland: Some Suggested Place-name Evidence’, Bulletin of the School of
Scottish Studies, 25 (1981), 1–24.
(^63) Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ii. 565–6; for the ubiquitous judices, see also
Gregory of Tours, Libri Historiarum X, 323.15, 367.25, 405.15.
(^64) Formulae, 88–9, 156.
(^65) Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World(London, 1977), 61, 117–19;