“Let no one, whether freeman or slave, presume to create any impediment in the election of the Roman pontiff.”
Which leads us to suspect that some slaves possessed considerable power or influence.
In the second chapter, fines are imposed for creating riots in any church. And the chapter concludes in the following words:
Et qui non habet unde ad ecclesiam persolvat, tradat se in servitio eidem ecclesiæ, usque dam totum debitum persolvat.
“And let him who has not the means of paying the church, give himself in servitude to that same church until he pays the whole debt.”
By the tenth chapter he restrained the power of manumission.
Quod per xxx annos servus liber fieri non possit, si pater illius servus, aut mater ancilla fuit. Similiter de Aldionibus præcipimus.
“That a slave whose father or whose mother was a slave cannot become free before thirty years of age. We order that the same shall be the case respecting Aldions.”
In the twelfth he states that these are but a continuance of the laws of his grandfather Charles and of his father Louis. And in tit. i. 12 of Ulpian, reference is made to a variety of enactments of the ancient Roman law, that a slave manumitted under the age of thirty could not be a Roman citizen except by a special grant of a court.
The thirteenth declares that free women who unite with their own slaves are in the royal power, and are given up, together with their children, to slavery among the Lombards.