For the most part, we must realise they came into territory, as they moved westward, which had been conquered by the Romans and which had again been conquered, from the Romans, by barbarians of the Gothic tribes. So the Franks found a population partly Roman and partly Gothic there, when they came. They found Roman laws as the principal laws of the country, slightly altered, no doubt, by the Gothic customs, but much as the Romans had established them. They found cities built in the Roman way—that is, within a square of walls, with a gate in the centre of each wall and streets running straight through from one gate to the other opposite to it. That was the usual plan of the Roman cities, if the ground allowed of their building in this way; and the roads went on through the surrounding country, from one city to another, very straight, very well made, turning as little as possible to right or left, and only turning this little when a mountain over which, or a river through which, it was impossible to carry the road came in the way.
The Frankish tribes which penetrated into Gaul from time to time—themselves, probably, pushed westward by the Huns who came from further east again—were divided into two great groups, the Ripuarian Franks and the Salian Franks. The name Ripuarian was given to the tribes who settled along the "ripa," which is the Latin word for "bank," of the Rhine. The name Salian, of the other great group, as we have seen already, is of doubtful origin, perhaps from the "saline" or "salt" sea; because this group came from the shores of the Baltic.
For a long time Franks kept pushing in from the East through the Empire's wall. There were Franks with the Gothic and Roman army that defeated Attila at Chalons in the middle of the fifth century. The Salians seem to have been the latest of the Franks to come in, but they became so strong that they dominated all the rest.
I have spoken of those great kings of the Franks, Pepin and Charlemagne, but the king under whom the big work was done of bringing all the Frankish tribes, and indeed all Gaul, under one authority, and giving them that union which means strength—that king was earlier than either of these. His name was Clovis.
He became king of the Salian Franks in 481. The kings of his dynasty were called Merovingian, from Merovig, an old chieftain. He made himself master of the whole of Gaul, except of what was then called Burgundy and Provence, in the south. But you should know that this name Burgundy, derived from that of one of the Gothic tribes, was made to cover very different territories, under rulers of different races, at different times in our story.
The "counts"
So here was this King Clovis of the Franks ruling over this large Empire. He found the Roman law and the Roman system of government in use there; and the Franks adopted as much as they could of the Roman customs into their own. But it was difficult. The Roman official who had represented the government of the Empire was called the "comes," or "count," and the Merovingian kings of the Franks seem to have tried to continue to govern through the "count." One of his duties was to collect taxes, but the Franks do not seem to have understood taxation as it was understood by the Romans. The Romans made assessment, that is to say calculations, from time to time, to find out how much money was needed for the government of a province, and they exacted from the people of the province as much as was required to meet that need. Under the Franks the tax came to be a fixed amount on property.
The duty of the Count in levying the tax cannot have been easy, for these Franks were one and all fighting men. In their own country the practice had been to hold an assembly of the tribe for the making of laws and judging cases. That was their idea of government. It was a plan which might work well for a small tribe. It was not suitable for a large empire.
The consequence is that we soon see the Count, and other men of rank and of large possessions in land, becoming more and more independent of the king, who really could not make his authority felt. One of the difficulties that the king found, arose from the custom, which was a Roman custom, of granting "immunities," as they were called, to certain persons and institutions. They were granted especially to institutions connected with the Church. They provided that the lands to which they were given should be "immune from" visits by the king's officials. The great man, or the great institution, to whom or to which the immunity was granted thus became like a small king, within his own kingdom. He could do almost as he pleased.
So there was always this trouble, and it grew greater as time went on, that the king's authority was more and more disputed, more and more weakened; and in this weakening of authority the security for life and for property grew weaker. The poorer people found that their best hope for a secure life was to put themselves under the protection of some rich and powerful man; that rich and powerful man found that his best hope for safety was to take under his protection as many as possible of these people, who, in return for the protection, would fight for him on occasion.