ABSTRACT
But more recent scholarship suggests that this conclusion is wrong or at least much too simple. For a very different picture is provided by some twenty-four documents, the so-called placita, which record the settlement of land disputes in the court of the Frankish king. These documents reveal that there existed well established judicial machinery for settling disputes without resort to force, based on detailed and pedantic procedures, laid down in manuals of formulae.2 This judicial machinery used written documents and required the survival of considerable Roman legal culture.3 The judicial rules were sanctioned not only by the power of the king but also by that of the magnates of the land, in whose interest it was that there should be functioning institutions, where land disputes could be settled peacefully. The procedure was therefore based on consensus. This meant
1 S. Dill, Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age (London, 1926) 306-7. 2 K. Zeumer (ed.), Formulae merowingici et karolini aevi, MGH leges 5 (Hannover, 1886).
