Search results
to England resulted in the conversion of King Aethelbert of Kent in 601, who went on to promulgate a new law code: see Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica i. 26; ii. 5. 49 See Councils and Synods , pp. 733
unsystematic to present much of a hierarchy, and anyway tended towards a personal rank ordering that was constantly contested and quite untidy, still, assumptions of hierarchy and rank were ubiquitous. 2 Geoffrey Koziol’s account of rituals of requests for pardon and favour assumes a world of unequal dyadic pairs. 3 Feudal relations are alleged to have been generalised by Carolingian rulers to reinforce kingship. 4 Power descended. 5 Law-codes differentiated the value of persons by their status and condition. 6 Recent work on the three orders of society, a ninth
allegedly sometimes carried to the extreme of the burning or killing of widows. 15 In the early medieval kingdoms constructed on Roman models, law-codes, some of them produced in the pre-Justinianic period, offer a perspective on the social relations of free men and women. These codes deal with stepmothers as part of the problems arising from inheritance and the protection of the rights of heirs. An enactment ascribed to the Visigothic king Euric (c.475) states that ‘if a man after his wife’s death brings a stepmother into his house, whatever property was left by his
encourages intergovernmentalism, which can lead to increased executive decision-making, and reduced opportunities for legislative engagement (Guiraudon 1997: 265–6; Simeon 1972; Smith 2005: 122–3). Despite these concerns, federalist structures also open opportunities for diversity-seeking engagement. Federalism most strongly played out in the temporary economic immigration case study (Chapter 7) where diversity-seeking groups in Canada, faced with a hostile political environment at the national level, were able to seek important legislative reforms to labour law codes in
language and their law-codes; the second, in Victorian times, witnessed that national search for the genius of English free institutions which discovered its origins in the law and polity of the early Teutonic peasantry. At both periods the links between national and local history were simultaneously racial and institutional. County history, with its origins in Tudor times, ‘was related to the perceived early racial divisions of the country: the British in Cornwall and Wales, with the shires south of the Tees under West-Saxon, Mercian or Danish
that deployed sources and evidence specifically to test Vergil’s statement. Contrary to modern expectations, those maintaining that parliament predated the reign of Henry I also preferred to co-opt, rather than to debunk, the Anglica historia. Sixteenthcentury English scholars were increasingly drawn towards humanist philology, particularly to the illumination of origins through etymology.57 Vergil’s observation that parliamentum derived from French could thus be interpreted as a linguistic comment. As editor of Anglo-Saxon law-codes (in his Archaionomia of 1568
of Kent’s law code made a similar pronouncement at the same time. 127 Edictum Pistense (a. 864) , ch. 31, in MGH Capit. 2, no. 273, pp. 323–4. 128 J. L. Nelson, ‘England and the continent in the ninth century III: rights and rituals’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , 14 (2004), 1–24, at 11. 129 J.-P. Devroey, ‘Peasant mobility and settlement’, in B. Kasten (ed.), Tätigkeitsfelder und Erfahrungshorizonte des ländlichen Menschen in der frühmittelalterlichen Grundherrschaft (bis ca. 1000) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2006), pp. 37–48. 130 See
in providing crucial evidence in favour of Ansemirus. The document lists the names of the people summoned as well as those who supported the oath that Ansemirus took to support his claim. This case shows that priests’ control of ecclesiastical dues was a potential source of social disruption. In Anglo-Saxon England a system of tithe payment made its appearance in tenth-century law codes. King Edgar’s legislation of the 960s established that all tithes were to be paid to the old minster, while allowing those thegns who had a church with a graveyard on their
ground level, and for how long, is difficult to assess, but provisions of Lex Salica , Lex Alamannorum and Lex Baiuuariorum are occasionally reflected in Carolingian and Saint-Gall charters, and it is quite clear that Visigothic law was widely known and widely cited in northern Iberia in the ninth and tenth centuries. 89 English law codes, which run from the seventh century, have a separate chain of transmission and are distinctive in being written in the vernacular; in the tenth and eleventh centuries, especially, some of the new rule-making was clearly
brandished treasured regalia and awarded honours to worthy subjects. They appointed and dismissed officials, recast institutions, proclaimed law codes and dispensed justice, promoted or restricted trade, dispatched and received diplomatic delegations, contracted alliances and battled enemies, and commissioned public works. Often they carried out these duties personally, whereas in Europe, many had been