The sworn inquest could also be applied to the injuries which would
come to be seen as ‘crimes’ against public authority. The missisitting at
Risano in Istria in 804 proceeded by selecting ‘chief men’ from all the
villages, to the number of 172, and making them swear on the gospels
and the relics of saints to answer truthfully and without fear the
questions they put to them, which were firstly about the things of the
Church, then about the justice administered by lords, the violent ways
of the people, and the situation of widows and orphans. The jurors in
this instance brought the missi writs (brevia) maintaining that the
Church had denied the people their customs. In 850, it was accepted
that the best way to track down thieves in Italy was by inquiry on oath
‘from all the people round about’.^110 In England 150 years later, the
twelve senior thegns and the reeve were required to swear in the wapen-
take court to the names of wrongdoers.^111
The Carolingians’ other great contribution to the legal order beside
the inquest was the corps of semi-professional judges whose function it
was to hear inquests and conduct the affairs of the public courts. At
least seven scabiniwere intended to be present at every plea, for there
was an increasing amount of law to be decided.^112 The defendant’s
formal denial that he had dispossessed the plaintiff iniuste et malo
ordinemight rest on the contention that the disputed land had been his
father’s hereditary property or given to him as a royal benefice, or that
it was in the full ownership of his bishopric for sixty years past: issues
of law as well as of fact. A claim to personal freedom might be based on
a charter of enfranchisement made ‘as the legal order and the ancient
custom of the realm demanded’. The notitiaof a case heard in the ducal
court (curte ducati) of Turin before the count and scabini, including two
‘Roman scabini’, and another count and a judexacting as royal missi,
might be disregarded because ‘all that was done there was done by force
and not by judgment’.^113 Scabiniand other ‘proper persons’ (idonei
homines) might support the claim that a charter proferred by a defen-
dant was invalid because it had not been written by a public notary.^114
Documents were of greatest importance in the legal arguments of Italy
and southern Gaul, where there seem to have been more lawyers than
in the north who were knowledgeable in both Roman and Frankish law
Legal order 35support legal claims or carry cases forward, see I Placiti del ‘Regnum Italiae’, i. 201. 27 ,
212– 13 , 405. 4 , iii. 23; Van Caenegem, Royal Writs in England.
(^110) I Placiti del ‘Regnum Italiae’, i. 50; Capitularia, ii. 87 (c. 3).
(^111) Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, i. 228 (3,1).
(^112) Capitularia, i. 185 (cc. 1–2), ii. 8; Ganshof, The Carolingians and the Frankish
Monarchy, 148–50, 157 n. 49; F. N. Estey, ‘The Scabiniand the Local Courts’, Speculum, 26
(1951), 119–29; I Placiti del ‘Regnum Italiae’, i. 353, 377–8, 477, 548–9.
(^113) Capitularia, i. 322, 420.7.
(^114) Ibid.i. 348–50.