Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/57

 2. JENKS: TEUTONIC LAW 43 And now, if we are asked the question — Did men during those tenth and eleventh centuries live without Law ? — the answer we must give is, that they mostly did, and that evil were the results. In the far south-west, where the Visigothic settlers had been crushed out of existence between the Sara- cens and the provincials, in Acquitaine, Gascony, Navarre, and Provence, the old Roman Law had remained the every- day law of the people. This is the country of the Langue d'Oc, the later pays de droit ecrit. But, elsewhere, the old ' Empire of Charles the Great had become a country of what the Germans call Sonderrecht; each little district had its own special law. For this was just the epoch of feudalism, and the p olitical unit was no longer the clan, or the peo - ple, but the fief, the district under the control of a sei- gneu r, or lord. Uf the place ot leudalism in political his- tory, we shall have to speak when we deal with the State; here we are concerned only with its influence on notions of Law. The feudal seigneur derived his powers from two sources. , On the one hand, he represented a little bit of the imperial | / authority of Charles the Great, which had, so to speak, set// up for itself. This is the true droit seigneurial. On the/ other hand, he had become, not merely lord, but proprietor/ of his district, and, in this character, he exercised droit fon cier. He might claim seigneurial rights over land in which he had ceased to have property ; and he might be merely proprietor of land of which another was seigneur, although in this case he was hardly a feudal lord. Again, his claims as seigneur might be more or less extensive ; he might be duke, count, baron, or simply seigneur justicier. He might claim High, Middle, or Low Justice. B ut the principle in any case was, that he administered the law of the fief, not the law~of the land, "or the king,^r the people. If there is a dispute as to what this law is, we must go, as Bouteillier tells us, to the greffe, or register of the court of the fief. If this is silent on the point, we must call the men of the fief together, and hold an enquete par tourbe, an enquiry by the multitude.^ ^La Somme Burale (ed Le Caron), Bk. I. Tit. 2.