As in the other laws so under these rules the alod clearly embraced both the land and the ‘pecunia’ and ‘mancipia’ upon it. Its object, like that of the similar clauses in the other laws and also like that of the Edict of Chilperic, seems to have been to protect the land in ordinary cases from passing over ‘from the spear to the spindle,’ while at the same time sanctioning inheritance by females even in the land of the alod when otherwise there would be danger of its passing away from the kindred altogether.
In certain cases the land of the alod was made to go to male heirs while the ‘pecunia’ and ‘mancipia’ upon it went to females.
Whether the word ‘pecunia’ in such cases should be translated by ‘cattle’[170] or the wider word ‘chattels,’ it must have included the cattle, and at first sight it is not easy to see how the rule would work which gave the cattle of the alod to a female and the land to a distant male heir. The cattle must in the nature of things have remained or be put upon land, and the awkward question arises upon whose land they remained or were put. And so we are brought once more to the practical question of the position of women in relation to the land. That in certain cases in default of male heirs they could inherit land is one thing; but this question of the cattle and slaves involves quite another.
Male next of kin takes the land and chieftainship, but females may have cattle upon the land.
When a sister received her portion or gwaddol under Cymric custom, and when she received so many cows for her maintenance from the chief of kindred, she must have had rights of grazing for her cattle in the family herd of her gwely. Till she married, her cattle would graze with the cattle of her paternal gwely; and when she married, with the cattle of her husband’s gwely. And so under the rules of this clause ‘De alodibus’ it does not follow that the distant male heir succeeding to the land of the alod was to evict her and her cattle from it. With the land he had to take also the responsibilities involved in the family holding. Clause V. states that to whomsoever the inheritance of the land shall come, to him ought to pertain the coat of mail, i.e. the birnie, and with it the duty of the chief of the kindred to avenge his kin and to see to the payment of wergeld if any one of the kin should be slain. Read from this point of view this clause ‘De alodibus’ becomes good evidence that, whatever changes may have been made as to female inheritance, the land of the alod had not yet lost all its tribal traits. It had not yet become the ‘res propria’ of an individual possessor under Roman law.
V. THE SO-CALLED LEX CHAMAVORUM.
This document, according to most recent authorities, relates to a district between the Frisians and Saxons to the North and East, with the river Meuse to the South.[171]
The Chamavi under Frankish law.
Its real title seems to be Notitia vel commemoratio de illa euva quæ se ad Amorem habet, and it seems to be not so much a code as a memorandum of the wergelds and fines of a Frankish people settled in the district alluded to. Probably in date it may belong to the time of Charlemagne, but before his changes in the currency.