ABSTRACT
Germanic law functioned orally via oaths which were accompanied by prescribed gestures. This oral dimension survived into the Middle Ages amongst laymen and with few exceptions (see for instance the Lex Salica, ch. 5) was juxtaposed for a long time to written law in Latin such as the attestation of legal transactions and the Church’s canon law. ‘The Middle Ages were therefore characterized by two legal traditions (oral and vernacular as distinct from written and Latin), so that whenever law was written down in German we stand at a meeting point of these two traditions’ (Green 1994: 100). The need to commit legal matters to writing in the vernacular was brought about by changes in the social architecture of the High Middle Ages such as the rise in importance of secular courts, the genesis of towns, both with their own burgeoning administrative infrastructures, etc. In fact, legal texts are perhaps the most important new German text-type of the thirteenth century. This includes several monumental texts – such as the Mainzer Landfrieden (1235) which Frederick II, under the influence of the practice of his adopted home of Sicily to formulate the law in several languages, had composed in Latin and German, and the Sachsenspiegel (see ch. 15) –, town laws, of which there are traces in the early thirteenth century but whose transmission ‘explodes’ in the later thirteenth century, and many Urbare (‘land registers’) and Weistümer (a uniquely German institution which allowed for the updating and refining of law). The passages selected below represent two further important legal text-types: the oath and the document.
