erning which we have almost no other contemporary information. A few charters, the scanty notes for this time of Gregory of Tours and the Roman writers, the contents of a few graves—the most important that of Childerich, father of Clovis (481-511), found at Tournay in 1653—are all that we would otherwise have had to show the extent of civilization under the earliest Merovingian kings.
The Salic Law was composed under Clovis. It concerns itself, as will be seen from the extracts here given, with the most manifold branches of administration. The system of landholding, the nature of the early village community, the relations of the Germans to the Romans, the position of the king, the classes of the population, family life, the disposal of property, judicial procedure, the ethical views of the time, are all illustrated in its sixty-five articles. Directly and indirectly we can gather from it a great mass of information. How clearly, for instance, does the title on insults (p. 181) show the regard paid for personal bravery and for female chastity! The false charge of having thrown away one's shield was punished as severely as assault and battery—and the person who groundlessly called a woman unclean paid a fine second only in severity to that imposed for attempted murder!
No. II., the Capitulary of 802, is, in reality, nothing more nor less than the foundation charter of that long-lived institution, the Holy Roman Empire. The latter, as will be remembered, began its existence on Christmas-day, 800, and ended it on August 6th, 1806. Already in Voltaire's time it had ceased to be "either holy, or Roman, or an empire," but its pretensions were kept up until all Germany fell asunder before the wars and the wiles of Napoleon.
This capitulary of Charlemagne is the programme, so to speak, of the young empire. It is the ideal—an ideal never once to be fulfilled—of what that empire should
