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Updated: June 2, 2025
Among Charlemagne's 65 Capitularies, which contain I,151 articles, may be counted 87 of moral, 293 of political, 130 of penal, no of civil, 85 of religious, 305 of canonical, 73 of domestic, and 12 of incidental legislation. Often, indeed, these Capitularies have no imperative or prohibitive character; they are simple counsels, purely moral precepts.
Certain Capitularies have been termed religious legislation, in contradistinction to canonical legislation, because they are really admonitions, religious exhortations, addressed not to ecclesiastics alone, but to the faithful, the Christian people in general, and notably characterized by good sense and, one might almost say, freedom of thought.
It is supposed that Colleges of Canons existed in the time of Pépin le Bref; it is at any rate certain that during his reign Saint Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz, assembled the clerks of his cathedral and obliged them to live together, in a house in common, as though it were a convent, under a rule of which Charlemagne makes mention in his Capitularies. A Canon's functions?
He was supposed to administer it in true accord with the Custom of Paris; he might as well have been asked to apply the Code of Hammurabi or the Capitularies of Charlemagne. But if the seigneur did not know the law, he at least knew the disputants, and his decisions were not often wide of the eternal equities. At any rate, if a suitor was not satisfied he could appeal to the royal courts.
In 1790, Casanova had a conversation with the Emperor Joseph II at Luxemburg, on the subject of purchased nobility, which he reports in the Memoirs. In February 1791, Casanova wrote to Countess Lamberg: "I have in my capitularies more than four hundred sentences which pass for aphorisms and which include all the tricks which place one word for another.
From the "Master of Sentences," he had passed to the "Capitularies of Charlemagne;" and he had devoured in succession, in his appetite for science, decretals upon decretals, those of Theodore, Bishop of Hispalus; those of Bouchard, Bishop of Worms; those of Yves, Bishop of Chartres; next the decretal of Gratian, which succeeded the capitularies of Charlemagne; then the collection of Gregory IX.; then the Epistle of Superspecula, of Honorius III. He rendered clear and familiar to himself that vast and tumultuous period of civil law and canon law in conflict and at strife with each other, in the chaos of the Middle Ages, a period which Bishop Theodore opens in 618, and which Pope Gregory closes in 1227.
The capitularies, or short legislative provisions, propounded by the sovereign, and adopted by the public assemblies of the nation, were a further advance in legislation.
Martin, bishop of Braga; the capitularies of Theodulfus, of Orleans; and the penitential canons, published in the Spicilegium of d'Acheri. To the study, both of the canon and civil law, schools were appropriated by Charlemagne: few, except persons intended for the ecclesiastical state, frequented them.
The Capitularies are chiefly administrative ordinances; the "law of the land," which is the same everywhere and for all persons, is an ideal to be realised in England alone of medieval states. Elsewhere the king's law is a supplement, a postscript; the privilege of the free man is to live under the law of his province, his lord's fief or his free city.
"A new epoch," says Von Maurer, "begins with the villa-foundations of Charles the Great and his ordinances respecting them, for that his celebrated capitularies in this connection were intended for his newly established villas is self-evident.
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