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The revenue of the Merovings seems chiefly to have fallen under four heads. |Revenue.| The first was the profits of the royal domain, worked by the domestici. The second was the produce of custom dues, levied both on the land and the sea-frontier of the empire. The third was the produce of fines and compositions in the law courts, of which one-third always went to the king. But the fourth, and most important, was the regular annual tribute of the countships. Each district was assessed in the king’s books for a defined sum, and this the count had to raise and send in, on his own responsibility. It seems that at first only the Gallo-Roman districts were charged with tribute. Theudebert, the grandson of Chlodovech, we are told, first subjected the native Frankish districts to the impost, a grievance so deeply felt that, when he died, the Austrasians rose, and slew Parthenius, the minister who had suggested to the king this method of increasing his revenue.

From this short sketch of the constitution of the Frankish realm it will be seen that its organisation lay half-way between the almost purely Teutonic forms of the government of early England and the almost purely Roman methods employed by Theodoric the Great in Italy. This is what might have been expected. The Frankish kingdom was by no means a primitive Teutonic state, but it was far more so than the Ostrogothic realm in Italy.