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whom were really derived from the Lombards of late Antiquity, since the latter, like the other ‘barbarian’ invaders of the Roman Empire were only a relatively small élite (and themselves an amalgam of different peoples) – had developed a strong sense of their own identity, sustained by the traditional law codes of the early medieval Lombard kings, but separate from the lombardi or inhabitants of
’s mental capacity, permitting comparison of the modern assessment processes with their medieval counterparts. Pre-modern laws mainly concentrated on the dis/ability of ID for agency and contractual powers, inheritance, also culpability and guardianship. Thus there is a long history of law codes that assign guardians to minors and to those deemed mentally incapable, already dealt with by Roman law (i.e. inheritance and legal controls over the mentally disturbed), which influenced canon law and the secular laws of France, England and Germany (via
Text of Cod. Vat. Lat. 8782, fols. 91 r –94 v 1 [This collection of laws is the earlier of two related texts purporting to contain the legislation of King Roger. As explained in the introduction, this text contains genuine legislation of King Roger and may be a law code promulgated in the 1140s, although certainly not at the meeting at Ariano in
experience, a tendency reflected in the period’s archaeological record, historical texts, and law codes as well. Lastly, with no healer to be found, the endlessly suffering speaker of the riddle Anhaga elicits deep empathy for its trauma, both the pain of endless attacks and also the excruciating loneliness of a solitary warrior. Collectively these analyses have shown both the payoff and the limits of this close-reading approach, and before closing I want to acknowledge explicitly and directly that this ‘conclusion’ is in
That single legal clause pales into insignificance compared to the range of such references in other law-codes, such as those of Æthelstan, Æthelred and Cnut. 30 So the question of the Alfredian contribution to military defence may justifiably be subjected to the same sort of sceptical pressures as some scholars, Malcolm Godden foremost amongst them, have imposed on Alfredian authorship, relating us to the issue so beloved of undergraduate essays: ‘Was Alfred really The Great?’ 31
Captains Thomas Dale and John Smith strengthened their regime with a quasi-military law code, and in 1612 a revised charter reinforced the company’s commercial base. 25 However, military discipline, com mercial reorganization, and further investment neither reduced stockholders’ losses nor alleviated settlers’ suffering. Soon, these circumstances conspired together to produce a momentous reformulation of
a problem one law code could encounter when it tried to translate theological ideas into principles of legal guidance. This was a law code which was undergoing rapid change in the course of the twelfth century, which was struggling to deal with the role of the judge and judicial discretion and, which, as a result, developed a language and a terminology with which it could be understood. This is a model which needs to be kept in mind when considering the way in which judges who had been trained in this ecclesiastical law found themselves in England and being
distinctive stage in the life cycle. Law codes and administrative records distinguish the young from the rest of society with a number of terms and ideas. While there were far fewer words to describe children in medieval Europe than in the modern world, age-specific terminology was in use. Gravediggers in Florence in 1400 did not use the Latin terms infans , puer and puella for anyone over the age of
. 579. 90 Present opinion is that formulae such as this one do represent actual practice at the time they were produced or at the time of later copying: see A. Rio, ‘Charters, law codes and formulae: the Franks between theory and practice’, in P. Fouracre and D. Ganz (eds), Frankland. The Franks and the World of the Early Middle Ages (Manchester, 2008), pp. 7–27 . But of course it not possible to demonstrate that the formulae do represent the documents that were in use when there are no surviving documents of that type. 91 A. Thacker, ‘Memorialising
. In particular, this chapter is interested in family, household and kinship, themes that have cropped up throughout this book. It situates the detailed explorations presented in each of the previous chapters alongside an exploration of Anglo-Saxon historical information, with a particular emphasis on contemporary (seventh-century) law codes. After all, the people buried in these sites were alive when the laws were first spoken about and written down, and as a result they were constructed from the same Zeitgeist , the same blood, sweat and attitudes of the