Part 6 (1/2)

[Sidenote: Rights of inheritance]

=2.= If the father and mother do not survive, and he leave brothers or sisters, they shall inherit.

=3.= But if there are none, the sisters of the father shall inherit.

=4.= But if there are no sisters of the father, the sisters of the mother shall claim the inheritance.

=5.= If there are none of these, the nearest relatives on the father's side shall succeed to the inheritance.

=6.= Of Salic land no portion of the inheritance shall go to a woman; but the whole inheritance of the land shall belong to the male s.e.x.[67]

LXII.

[Sidenote: Payment of wergeld]

=1.= If any one's father shall have been slain, the sons shall have half the compounding money [wergeld]; and the other half, the nearest relatives, as well on the mother's as on the father's side, shall divide among themselves.[68]

=2.= But if there are no relatives, paternal or maternal, that portion shall go to the fisc.[69]

FOOTNOTES:

[39] St. Martin was born in Pannonia somewhat before the middle of the fourth century. For a time he followed his father's profession as a soldier in the service of the Roman emperor, but later he went to Gaul with the purpose of aiding in the establishment of the Christian Church in that quarter. In 372 he was elected bishop of Tours and shortly afterwards he founded the monastery with which his name was destined to be a.s.sociated throughout the Middle Ages. This monastery, which was one of the earliest in western Europe, became a very important factor in the prolonged combat with Gallic paganism, and subsequently a leading center of ecclesiastical learning.

[40] Childeric I., son of the more or less mythical Merovius, was king from 457 to 481. Clovis became ruler of the Salian branch of the Franks in this latter year. The tomb of Childeric was discovered at Tournai in 1653.

[41] aegidius and his son Syagrius were the last official representatives of the Roman imperial power in Gaul; and since the fall of the Empire in the West even they had taken the t.i.tle of ”king of the Romans” and had been practically independent sovereigns in the territory between the Somme and the Loire, with their capital at Soissons, northeast of Paris.

[42] Alaric II., king of the Visigoths, 485-507.

[43] The battle of Soissons in 486, with the defeat and death of Syagrius, insured for the Franks undisputed possession southward to the Loire, which was the northern frontier of the Visigothic kingdom.

[44] The Campus Martius was the ”March-field,” i.e., the a.s.sembling place of the Frankish army. It was not regularly in any one locality but wherever the king might call the soldiers together, as he did every spring for purposes of review. In the eighth century the month of May was subst.i.tuted for March as the time for the meeting.

[45] In the words of Hodgkin (_Charles the Great_, p. 12), ”the well-known story of the vase of Soissons ill.u.s.trates at once the German memories of freedom and the Merovingian mode of establis.h.i.+ng a despotism. As a battle comrade the Frankish warrior protests against Clovis receiving an ounce beyond his due share of the spoils. As a battle leader Clovis rebukes his henchman for the dirtiness of his accoutrements, and cleaves his skull to punish him for his independence.”

[46] The Alemanni were a German people occupying a vast region about the upper waters of the Rhine and Danube. They had been making repeated efforts to acquire territory west of the Rhine--an encroachment which Clovis resolved not to tolerate.

[47] The battle was fought near Stra.s.sburg, in the upper Rhine valley.

[48] The ultimate result of the defeat of the Alemanni was that the Frankish kingdom was enlarged by the annexation of the great region known in the later Middle Ages as Suabia, comprising modern Alsace, Baden, Wurtemberg, the western part of Bavaria, and the northern part of Switzerland. The Alemanni as a people disappeared speedily from history, being absorbed by their more powerful neighbors. Their only monument to-day is the name by which the French have always known the people of Germany--_Allemands_.

[49] The Loire was the boundary between the dominions of the two kings. There have been many famous instances in history of two sovereigns coming together to confer at some point on the common border of the territories controlled by them, notably the interview of Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I. on the Niemen River in 1807. The Franks and the Visigoths had been enemies ever since by Clovis's defeat of Syagrius their dominions had been brought into contact (486), and the present jovial interview of the two kings did not long keep them at peace with each other.

[50] St. Hilary was bishop of Poitiers in the later fourth century. He was a contemporary of St. Martin of Tours and a co-worker with him in the organization of Gallic Christianity.

[51] The plain of Vouille was ten miles west of Poitiers.

[52] This amusing comment of Gregory was due largely to his prejudice in favor of the Franks and against the heretical Visigoths.

[53] The Visigothic kingdom in Spain, with its capital at Toledo, endured until the Saracen conquest of that country in 711 and the years immediately following, but it did not give evidence of much strength. It stood so long only because the Pyrenees made a natural boundary against the Franks and because, after Clovis, for two hundred years the Franks produced no great conqueror who cared to crowd the Visigoths into still closer quarters.