ABSTRACT
THE accepted theory that the nobility originated in the age of the barbarian kingdoms, in the first place among the Franks, is the result more of speculation than of a careful analysis of the sources. How have scholars arrived at this view? In the first place it arose naturally out of the fundamental hypotheses which prevailed concerning the previous Germanic period. If, during that time, there was a republican constitution, in which all power rested with the people and all freemen had equal rights, so that there was no especially privileged nobility, 1 then it seemed obvious that there could have beeen no such nobility in the earlier Frankish period. This negative argument was supplemented by a positive one drawn from the Lex Salica, which was for long regarded as the main source of information for early Frankish conditions, and which does not mention a nobility. Consequently, it is argued, no such nobility existed. But is this conclusion really justifiable? Important jurists 2 had already shown that in the case of the Lex Salica an argument ex silentio of this sort proves nothing. Many important judicial questions, such, for example, as the right of inheritance, are not mentioned in it, even though they must already have been in existence; the object of the law was not to give a complete account of the Salic order of inheritance.
