ABSTRACT
The problems to which Murray, Professor of History at the University of Toronto and a student of Walter Goffart, points are similar to those studied by Ian Wood. Both scholars are interested in the operations of the Merovingian state. Wood looked in particular at some bureaucratic practices and the documents created by those practices. Murray, who has made many important contributions to our understanding of the workings of the Merovingian government, addresses himself to law in this article. In the past law seemed the perfect lens for viewing the collapse of the magnificent Roman legal system in the barbarian chaos of the early medieval kingdom. As so often, that past view was wrong. Law in the Merovingian state was different from Roman law, but owed a great deal to it. The reader of Murray’s article will want to ask about the debt of Merovingian public law to Rome, and about what Merovingian law reveals about the state in Frankish Gaul. Note that Murray emphasizes less the technical and intellectual aspects of jurisprudence than the basic issue of whether the Merovingians cared about and sought to promote public order. One last time, in this volume, a serious and focused piece of historical research sheds light on the ways in which Rome tutored its successors, and found them to be eager pupils.
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