ABSTRACT
The Holy Roman Empire's legal and constitutional structure passed through several stages. In the beginning, when the Germanic tribal tradition was still strong, the empire was conceived as a corporate community in which all of its associated members were jointly represented. The origins of the Holy Roman Empire lie in the Germanic tribes that streamed into Central Europe in the first centuries of the Common Era. These tribes were to substantial extent oath societies, based on oath relationships between both equals and unequals. The exceptions in Germany were the municipal corporations that emerged from the mid-eleventh to the mid-fourteenth centuries, rising out of the framework of feudalism to transform the contractual elements of the feudal system into a basis for local liberties. The effort to reform the Holy Roman Empire failed for some of the same reasons that the Conciliar movement failed to reform the Roman Catholic Church.
