Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/259

247 parts of Gaul, and then over Alemanni, Burgundians, and Visigoths, they likewise had no thought of forcing their laws either upon Gallo-Romans or upon the Teuton people previously dominant within a given territory. This remained true even of the later Frankish period, when the Carolingians conquered the Lombard kingdom in upper Italy.

Indeed, to all these Teutons and to the Roman provincials as well, it seemed as a matter of course that tribal or local laws should be permitted to endure among the peoples they belonged to. These assumptions and the conditions of the growing Frankish Empire evoked, as it were, a more acute mobilization of the principle that to each people belonged its law. For provincials and Teuton peoples were mingling throughout the Frankish realm, and the first obvious solution of the legal problems arising was to hold that provincials and Teutons everywhere should remain amenable and entitled to their own law, which was assumed to attend them as a personal appurtenance. Of course this solution became intolerable as tribal blood and delimitations were obscured, and men moved about through the territories of one great realm. Archbishop Agobard of Lyons remarks that one might see five men sitting together, each amenable to a different law. The escape from this legal confusion was to revert to the idea of law and custom as applying to every one within a given territory. The personal principle gradually gave way to this conception in the course of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. In the meanwhile during the Merovingian, and more potently in the Carolingian period, king's law, as distinguished from people's law, had been an influence making for legal uniformity throughout that wide conglomerate empire which acknowledged the authority of the Frankish king or emperor. The king's law might emanate from the delegated authority, and arise from the practices, of royal functionaries;