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The count’s tribunal was called the Mallus. He sat in company with a few assessors, chosen from the chief men of the district. These magnates were called Rachimburgi, or Boni Homines. They were summoned by the count, and had no authority independent of his, but by ancient custom—both Roman and Teutonic—assessors had always been called in to aid the chief judge. The system is found alike at the tribunal of the Roman provincial magistrate presiding in his conventus, and in the primitive German law courts described by Tacitus. The count, sitting in his Mallus, had full power of life and death, and authority in all cases, save where the persons concerned were so great that the case might be called before the King’s High Court, and tried by the king himself and the Comes Palatinus.

The Franks not unfrequently enforced the death penalty for murder, arson, brigandage, and other great crimes. But they used also the system of weregeld, like our own Anglo-Saxon forefathers. With the consent of the family of the victim, almost every murder could be condoned on the payment of sums varying from 30 gold solidi for a slave to 1800 for a freeman of high rank. |Weregeld.| In cases when the proof of a crime was difficult on the evidence produced, the Franks often made use of oaths and compurgations. The accused for himself, or a body of his supporters in his behalf, made a solemn oath that he was innocent, and this sufficed to acquit him if no further evidence was produced. Judicial combats were also not unfrequent. They appear among the Burgundians, however, before they were taken up by the Franks. Nor was the custom unknown of submitting criminals whose conviction was difficult to the ordeal: that by boiling water, where the accused plunged his hand into a caldron, was the one most frequently used.