ABSTRACT
The Bavarian Law Code is one of the more comprehensive, varied and informative of the medieval ethnic or ‘tribal’ laws. Generally, capitularies are royal decrees or judgments, but their content is very diverse. The extant texts of the Bavarian Law Code are grouped in three major groups or classes. The first group includes manuscripts which originated in Bavaria and which contain only the Bavarian Code. The second group comes from northern Italy. The third group comes from the west, in France, and comprises anthologies of the two Frankish, the Bavarian and the Alemannic codes. The councils of Dingolfing and Neuching include a large amount of non-ecclesiastical legislation on important issues related to slavery. Their records are preserved together with texts of the Law Code, a fact which recognizes their contribution, as the Neuching protocol puts it, to the ‘Common Laws’.
