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. This was a revealing lapse in Grousset’s scholarship. In the 1920s, Maurice Grandeclaude had subjected the thirteenth-century law codes of Jerusalem, the Assises, to careful analysis to try to determine the survival of any of the pre-1187 legal procedures.2 Thirty years earlier, Munro had insisted that such law codes could not simply be used to describe twelfth-century circumstances, as Dodu had imagined. In his Lowell lectures at Harvard in 1924, Munro himself had sketched a picture of how Outremer society worked based on sources not sentiment and covering wide
. 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
important bearings on the issue of continuity. Also of great interest is the relationship between the secular and the sacred when both call for the needs of the Church to be provided for. Was it envisaged that people could simply be ordered to provide? Or was this a matter of religious exhortation? Alongside the law codes and the legislation of particular rulers, we have a raft of normative material produced by the Church. This consists of the rulings of church councils, episcopal orders and statutes, and the customs of religious houses. It is in these sources that we
contemporary female ascetics, even of the tantric variety (Denton 2004), who have chosen to renounce traditional marriage and householder rules. The regulations derived from the Dharma Shastras (the sacred law codes) as propounded in the Laws of Manu (1969) – written somewhere between the second century BCE and the second century CE – have none the less provided the principal guidelines for women’s conduct, though they have not been ubiquitous throughout India.14 In the Brahmanic tradition, a woman’s 132 Irigaray's eastern excursion husband is regarded as her god – she is
being remitted to the beneficiary of the privilege of immunity, and this seems to be what lay behind the grant of judicial rights to the immunist. Chief amongst these was the right to collect the fretum . This was a proportion (usually said to be one-third) of the composition fine paid to the ruler or to his or her representative the count for arranging the peace between a victim of a ‘crime’ and its perpetrator. Such compensation arrangements, the stuff of the law codes, were always expressed in cash amounts, as were other sorts of fine, such as the fine for
because people’s multi-faceted identities were intertwined with material things, visual experiences, spaces and landscapes (Gosden, 2005 ). Moreover, objects are part of how people define themselves and each other, and are central to how people interact. How a person looks will influence how someone responds to them within a specific cultural setting, because objects are situated intermediately in relationships and act as fulcrums for interpersonal interactions. The aesthetic of relationships reinforces perception – for example, some of the earliest law codes
stria who is proven to have eaten a man is liable to a fine of 8000 denarii.7 In later law codes, it was rather the belief in such creatures that was more often condemned, with women who were accused of being monstrous witches frequently entitled to compensation. The continuing presence of such laws testifies to the durability of the belief that certain women could be strigae in fact, as do similar entries in early-medieval penitentials and the later exempla of preachers, and this popular belief existed side by side with the educated, clerical position approved by the
instance, the threat of total confiscation (both of titles and inheritances) ensured absolute loyalty. From Alfred on, we can see changing notions of kingship and power in early medieval England. Charters narrativise how all land comes from the king with the possession of such lands demanding obligations. Moreover, the law codes reveal that the bonds between a king and his thane can be forever undone through especially heinous crimes. In numerous places, we also read that sovereigns revoke privileges and transfer ownership to fortify their realm. All this would suggest
. 68–9. Religious Saxons: Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae 195 capitali sententia(e) punietur.78 In contrast to such customary expressions, the phrase morte moriatur has only one real precedent: the Old Testament. In particular, we encounter the phrase in two of the Old Testament law codes, known today as the Covenant Code (Exodus 21.1–23.19) and the Holiness Code (Leviticus 17–26).79 In the Carolingian period, these codes were seen as part of one and the same legal tradition, known as the ‘Old Law’ (Vetus Lex) or simply ‘the Law’ (Lex).80 The origins of the Old