In the Wisigothic laws the disintegration of tribal society is so far advanced that the wergelds of the ingenuus class are regulated, not by kindred or social position, but, as we have seen, according to the age of the individual.
It is difficult not to connect the substitution of artificial grades for those dependent on kindred with the Roman tendency to divide society into ‘patrician’ and ‘plebs,’ and the ‘plebs’ according to position and wealth into honestiores and humiliores.
Already in Cæsar’s time we see how difficult it was from a Roman point of view to understand the relation under tribal custom of the dependent tribesmen to their chieftain. Cæsar does not seem to have recognised the link of blood-relationship between them. To his view the chieftains were equites and the tribesmen almost their servi. It was difficult otherwise to bring the two classes within some recognised category of Roman law.
So it was no doubt, in degree, at the later period in the case of the conquering German tribes, when the Romanising forces were mainly in clerical hands.
The influence of the Church also told in favour of the artificial and anti-tribal division of the people into great men and small men. Its tenets of individual responsibility favoured individualism.
The anti-tribal influences of the Church in Southern Europe.
Canon XVI. of the Council of Orleans (A.D. 549) shows that the ecclesiastical mind in Gaul was familiar with the division into classes ‘majorum et mediocrium personarum.’
Evidence of Merovingian formulæ as regards wergelds.
A canon of an earlier Council (A.D. 511) shows how by taking refuge in a church a homicide received protection till composition was arranged, and how thus the question of wergelds was brought within clerical recognition. Once brought within its power the Church was not likely to let it slip from its grasp. And the collections of Formulæ of the Merovingian period show how the clergy joined with the other authorities in arranging the payment of wergelds and the prevention of private vengeance. From these formulæ it would seem that the payment and perhaps the amount of the wergeld had become to some extent a matter of mediation and arrangement through the intervention of ‘boni homines’ who were sometimes ‘sacerdotes.’[330] And when the award was given and the payment made, it was natural that a formal charter of acknowledgment in stay of vengeance on the part of the relations of the slain should be insisted upon. Each set of formulæ contains a form for this purpose. The matter of wergelds had become a subject of Franco-Roman conveyancing.