page_title: Salic law
section_title: History of the law
hierarchical_section_title: Salic law / History of the law
caption_attribution_description: English: The Frankish Foederati' around 360 A.D; based on the maps present at the tacitus.nu website; LINK; showing the Frankish expansion.
context_page_description: The Salic law, or the Salian law, was the ancient Salian Frankish civil law code compiled around AD 500 by the first Frankish King, Clovis. The written text is in Latin and contains some of the earliest known instances of Old Dutch. It remained the basis of Frankish law throughout the early Medieval period, and influenced future European legal systems. The best-known tenet of the old law is the principle of exclusion of women from inheritance of thrones, fiefs and other property. The Salic laws were arbitrated by a committee appointed and empowered by the King of the Franks. Dozens of manuscripts dating from the sixth to eighth centuries and three emendations as late as the ninth century have survived.
  Salic law provided written codification of both civil law, such as the statutes governing inheritance, and criminal law, such as the punishment for murder. Although it was originally intended as the law of the Salians or Western Franks, it has had a formative influence on the tradition of statute law that extended to modern history in Western and Central Europe, especially in the German states, the Netherlands, parts of Italy and Spain, Austria-Hungary, Romania, and the Balkans.
context_section_description: The original edition of the code was commissioned by the first king of all the Franks, Clovis I (c. 466–511), and published sometime between 507 and 511. He appointed four commissioners to research uses of laws that, until the publication of the Salic Law, had been recorded only in the minds of designated elders, who would meet in council when their knowledge was required. Transmission was entirely oral. Salic Law therefore reflects ancient usages and practices. In order to govern more effectively, it was desirable for monarchs and their administrations to have a written code. The name of the code comes from the circumstance that Clovis was a Merovingian king ruling only the Salian Franks before his unification of Francia. The law must have applied to the Ripuarian Franks as well; however, containing only 65 titles, it may not have included any special Ripuarian laws.
  For the next 300 years the code was copied by hand, and was amended as required to add newly enacted laws, revise laws that had been amended, and delete laws that had been repealed. In contrast with printing, hand copying is an individual act by an individual copyist with ideas and a style of his own. Each of the several dozen surviving manuscripts features a unique set of errors, corrections, content and organization. The laws are called "titles" as each one has its own name, generally preceded by de, "of", "concerning". Different sections of titles acquired individual names which revealed something about their provenances. Some of these dozens of names have been adopted for specific reference, often given the same designation as the overall work, lex.
caption: Salian settlement in Toxandria, where they had recently settled or been settled in 358, when Julian the Apostate made them dediticii.
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