Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/160

 CHAPTER V

GAUL UNDER THE MEROVINGIAN FRANKS

INSTITUTIONS

Having narrated in the previous chapter the events of the Merovingian period, we have now to explain what were the institutions of that period, to shew the nature of the constitution and organisation of the Church and describe the various classes of society.

There is one very important general question which arises in regard to the Merovingian institutions. According to certain historians of the Roman school, the Roman institutions were retained after the occupation of Gaul under Clovis. The Merovingian officials, according to these writers, answer to the former Roman officials, the Mayor of the Palace, for instance, representing the former praepositus sacri cubiculi; the powers of the king were those formerly exercised by the Roman Emperor; the Germans brought no new institutions into Gaul; after much destruction they adopted the Roman. According to other historians, on the contrary, those who form a Germanic school, all the institutions which we find in the Merovingian period were of Germanic origin; they are the same as those which Tacitus describes to us in the De Moribus Germanorum. The Teutons, they assert, not only infused into the decaying Gallo-Roman society the new blood of a young and vigorous stock, but also brought with them from the German forests a whole system of institutions proper to themselves. The historians of both these schools have fallen into exaggeration. On the one hand, in the time of the Roman Empire, Gaul had never had a centralised administration of its own; it was nothing but a diocese (dioecesis) governed from Rome. And when Gaul had to provide for its own needs, it became necessary to create a new system of central administration; even the local administration was greatly modified by the necessity of holding the Gallo-Roman population in check, and the number of officials had to be increased. On the other hand, the Germanic institutions which had been suitable for small tribes on the further side of the