18 Facts About Salic law

Salic law, called the was the ancient Frankish civil law code compiled around AD 500 by the first Frankish King, Clovis.

The best-known tenet of the old Salic law is the principle of exclusion of women from inheritance of thrones, fiefs and other property.

Salic law provided written codification of both civil law, such as the statutes governing inheritance, and criminal law, such as the punishment for murder.

Salic law appointed four commissioners to research customary law that, until the publication of the Salic Law, had been recorded only in the minds of designated elders, who would meet in council when their knowledge was required.

Salic law added laws of choice taken from the earlier law codes of Germanic peoples not originally part of Francia.

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Glosses to the Salic law code contain several Old Dutch words and what is likely the earliest surviving full sentence in the language:.

Civil Salic law establishes that an individual person is legally unprotected if he or she does not belong to a family.

One tenet of the civil Salic law is agnatic succession, explicitly excluding females from the inheritance of a throne or fief.

Indeed, "Salic law" has often been used simply as a synonym for agnatic succession.

Law merely prohibited women from inheriting ancestral "Salic land"; this prohibition did not apply to other property ; and under Chilperic I sometime around the year 570, the law was actually amended to permit inheritance of land by a daughter if a man had no surviving sons.

Feudal Salic law allowed the transmission of fiefs to daughters in default of sons, which was the case for the early appanages.

Whether feudal Salic law applied to the French throne no one knew, until 1316.

Jurists later resurrected the long-defunct Salic law and reinterpreted it to justify the line of succession arrived at in the cases of 1316 and 1328 by forbidding not only inheritance by a woman but inheritance through a female line .

Only several hundred years later, under the Direct Capetian kings of France and their English contemporaries who held lands in France, did Salic law become a rationale for enforcing or debating succession.

Philip's agents were instructed to "insinuate cleverly" that the Salic law was a "pure invention".

However, even if the "Salic law" did not really apply to the throne of France, the very principle of agnatic succession had become a cornerstone of the French royal succession; they had upheld it in the Hundred Years' War with the English, and it had produced their kings for more than two centuries.

The War of the Austrian Succession was triggered by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 in which Charles VI of Austria, who himself had inherited the Austrian patrimony over his nieces as a result of Salic law, attempted to ensure the inheritance directly to his own daughter Maria Theresa of Austria, which was an example of an operation of Semi-Salic law.

Salic law was an important issue in the Schleswig-Holstein Question and played a day-to-day role in the inheritance and marriage decisions of common princedoms of the German states, such as Saxe-Weimar, to cite a representative example.