4 - THE READING OF NORMATIVE TEXTS: BENEDICTUS LEVITA AND REGINO

Summary

In the first two chapters I suggested, using the leges themselves and their manuscripts, as well as charters and hagiography, that leges might be read, and indeed compiled, when trying to understand social rank, traditions of landholding, and service obligations, for the purposes of making land transactions. In the third chapter I suggested that certain texts edited as capitularies preserved evidence that leges might be read by those involved in settling disputes for their material on quite a wide range of subjects, such as marriage, the responsibility of children, homicide, and theft. We turn in this chapter to consider the use of leges in practice from another angle. The approach is not to search for needles suggestive of reference to leges in the haystack of all extant Carolingian charters, but rather to follow a small number of leads suggestive of resonance with and reference to legal texts. These cases involve the only instances in which material from leges is incorporated into collections considered and edited as discrete texts: that is, where the Lex Ribuaria was used in Regino of Prüm's Libri Duo in the context of manumission, and where the Lex Baiuwariorum was used in Benedictus Levita's collection in the context of compensations for homicide and injury of clerics. We are able in these two cases to situate the quotation of lex in a context of the use of other texts, and identify some possible underlying pressures leading to a particular kind of interpretation. We can see something of how the leges sat alongside other normative texts, notably capitularies and canons, as possible sources of material for use in arguments at very major fault lines in Carolingian thought: the distinction between clerical and lay status, and between servile and free.

CLERICAL COMPENSATIONS

Texts and problems

While the earliest redactions of the Lex Salica famously do not cover situations involving clerics at all, the question of how to compensate injuries and homicides of churchmen was treated with some variety and detail in the following centuries. A number of normative statements about clerical compensations can be found in the Frankish and sub-Frankish leges from the seventh and eighth centuries: leges Baiuwariorum, Alemannorum, and Ribuaria. In the ninth century normative statements were made about the problems, some of them relatively general, some adding explicitly to Lex Salica.