The sense of public participation in the government was furthered by
semiannual assemblies of armed property owners, gathered, as military or
other convenience might dictate, at Worms, Valenciennes, Aachen, Geneva,
Paderborn... usually in the open air. At such assemblies the king submitted
to smaller groups of nobles or bishops his proposals for legislation; they
considered them, and returned them to him with suggestions; he formulated
the capitula, or chapters of legislation, and presented these to the
multitude for their shouted approval; rarely the assembly voiced disapproval
with a collective grunt or moan. Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims, has
transmitted an intimate picture of Charles at one of these gatherings,
“saluting the men of most note, conversing with those whom he seldom saw,
showing a tender interest toward the elders, and disporting himself with the
young.”
At these meetings each provincial bishop and administrator was required to
report to the King any significant event in his locality since the previous
convocation. “The King wished to know,”says Hincmar, “whether in any part or
corner of the Kingdom the people were restless, and the cause thereof.”
Sometimes (continuing the old Roman institution of inquisitio) the
representatives of the King would summon leading citizens to inquire and
give under oath a “true statement”(veredictum) as to the taxable wealth, the
state of public order, the existence of crimes or criminals, in the district
visited. In the ninth century, in Frank lands, this verdict of a jurata, or
sworn group of inquirers, was used to decide many local issues of land
ownership or criminal guilt. Out of the jurata, through Norman and English
developments, would come the jury system of modern times.
The empire was divided into counties, each governed in spiritual matters by
a bishop or archbishop, and in secular affairs by a comes (companion- of the
king) or count. A local assembly of landholders convened twice or thrice a
year in each provincial capital to pass upon the government of the region,
and serve as a provincial court of appeals. The dangerous frontier counties,
or marches, had special governors- graf, margrave, or markherzog; Roland of
Roncesvalles, for example, was governor of the Breton march. All local
administration was subject to missi dominici- “emissaries of the master”-
sent by Charlemagne to convey his wishes to local officials, to review their
actions, judgments, and accounts; to check bribery, extortion, nepotism, and
exploitation, to receive complaints and remedy wrongs, to protect “the
Church, the poor, and wards and widows, and the whole people”from
malfeasance or tyranny, and to report to the King the condition of the
realm; the Capitulare missorum establishing these emissaries was a Magna
Carta for the people, four centuries before England’s Magna Carta for the
aristocracy. That this capitulary meant what it said appears from the case
of the duke of Istria, who, being accused by the missi of divers injustices
and extortions, was forced by the King to restore his thievings, compensate
every wronged man, publicly confess his crimes, and give security against
their repetition.
Barring his wars, Charlemagne’s was the most just and enlightened government
that Europe had known since Theodoric the Goth. The sixty-five capitularies
that remain of Charlemagne’s legislation are among the most interesting
bodies of medieval law. They were not an organized system, but rather the
extension and application of previous “barbarian”codes to new occasion or
need.
In some particulars they were less enlightened than the laws of King
Liutprand of Lombardy: they kept the old wergild, ordeals, trial by combat,
and punishment by mutilation; and decreed death for relapse into paganism,
or for eating meat in Lent- though here the priest was allowed to soften the
penalty. Nor were all these capitularies laws; some were answers to
inquiries, some were questions addressed by Charlemagne to officials, some
were moral counsels. “It is necessary,” said one article, “that every man
should seek to the best of his strength and ability to serve God and walk in
the way of His precepts; for the Lord Emperor cannot watch over every man in
personal discipline.” Several articles struggled to bring more order into
the sexual and marital relations of the people. Not all these counsels were
obeyed; but there runs through the capitularies a conscientious effort to
transform barbarism into civilization.
Charlemagne legislated for agriculture, industry, finance, education, and
religion as well as for government and morals. His reign fell into a period
when the economy of southern France and Italy was at low ebb through the
control of the Mediterranean by the Saracens. “The Christians,”said Ibn
Khaldun, “could no longer float a plank upon the sea.” The whole structure
of commercial relations between Western Europe and Africa and the Levant was
disturbed; only the Jews- whom Charlemagne sedulously protected for this
reason- connected the now hostile halves of what under Rome had been a
united economic world. Commerce survived in Slavic and Byzantine Europe, and
in the Teutonic north. The English Channel and the North Sea were alive with
trade; but this too would be disordered, even before Charlemagne’s death, by
Norse piracy and raids. Vikings on the north and Moslems on the south almost
closed the ports of France, and made her an inland and agricultural state.
The mercantile middle class declined, leaving no group to compete with the
rural aristocracy; French feudalism was promoted by Charlemagne’s land
grants and by the triumphs of Islam.
