Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- 1 Texts, Discourses, and Devices: Reading Visigothic Society Today
- 2 Presence of Augustine of Hippo in Isidore of Seville: Some Provisional Remarks
- 3 The Bishop and the Word: Isidore of Seville and the Production of Meaning
- 4 Unearthing Peasant Societies: Historiography and Recent Contributions in the Archaeology of the Rural World during Visigothic Times
- 5 Excolentes sacra fontium vel arborum: Pagan Cults, Kinship, and Regimes of Sacralization in the Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo
- 6 Ervig and Capital Penalties: The Way of Exile
- 7 ‘Put All Your Trust in Ansemundus’: A Look at Distrust in Visigothic-Byzantine Diplomatic Relations
- 8 Visigothic Currency: Recent Developments and Data for Its Study
- Index
6 - Ervig and Capital Penalties: The Way of Exile
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- 1 Texts, Discourses, and Devices: Reading Visigothic Society Today
- 2 Presence of Augustine of Hippo in Isidore of Seville: Some Provisional Remarks
- 3 The Bishop and the Word: Isidore of Seville and the Production of Meaning
- 4 Unearthing Peasant Societies: Historiography and Recent Contributions in the Archaeology of the Rural World during Visigothic Times
- 5 Excolentes sacra fontium vel arborum: Pagan Cults, Kinship, and Regimes of Sacralization in the Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo
- 6 Ervig and Capital Penalties: The Way of Exile
- 7 ‘Put All Your Trust in Ansemundus’: A Look at Distrust in Visigothic-Byzantine Diplomatic Relations
- 8 Visigothic Currency: Recent Developments and Data for Its Study
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The legal system of the Visigothic Kingdom was significantly indebted to Roman law, and for a long time it preserved the Late Roman capital penalties of death and deportation. Yet, Ervig's reign appears to be marked by a turning point, at the end of the seventh century: his laws ended the coexistence of both penalties in the Visigothic penal system, leaving exile as the only punishment incurred by political and religious offenders. Such a reform needs to be carefully weighed: was it a real break with prior penal practice? Can it be interpreted as a Christian reform of the civil law? And what about the seemingly increasing confusion between exile and servitude?
Keywords: Romano-Germanic Law, Death penalty, Exile, Seventh Century, Visigothic kingship
Research on Visigothic history is severely constrained by the paucity of available evidence. In many areas, historians are all but blind and will probably remain so in the future unless new sources turn up unexpectedly, as has recently happened. Most of the documentation on which scholars can ground their historical discourse is normative, and to a lesser extent narrative, hence indicating that some avenues of research are easier to explore than others. Penal history is one such avenue. In the Visigothic realm, as in other geographical areas, it has been traditionally addressed mainly by jurists; yet, historians, too, have something to say about legal history, as has been made plain by recent (and not so recent) developments in scholarship concerning the Later Roman Empire. In the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo, royal power relied on the law both to ensure its own legitimacy and to exercise political control over the elites; accordingly, studying political power involves an awareness of legal history and especially the history of punishment.
Fines apart, Visigothic penalties affected convicts either physically or in their legal capacity. The loss of some or all civil rights (the latter involving confiscation) could be compounded by decalvatio (itself a supplementary penalty), flogging, exile, enslavement, or death. I will focus here on exile, which was inherited from Roman law in several forms.
Exile originally was a capital penalty, a simple circumvention of death, designed as a privilege for the few.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Framing Power in Visigothic SocietyDiscourses, Devices, and Artifacts, pp. 133 - 158Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020