It happened to me, some years since, in the course of some historical inquiries, to wish for fuller information in regard to the barbarous feudal codes of the Middle Ages,as the Salic, Burgundian, and Ripuarian,before the time of Charlemagne.

Between the fifth and the ninth centuries we get the Visigothic, Burgundian, Salic, Ripuarian, Alemannic, Lombardian, Bavarian, Frisian, Saxon, and Thuringian law books.

According to the Salic and Ripuarian law this would be one order of succession: I. Children of the deceased.

" "The Salic and Ripuarian law condemned the freeman guilty of this degradation [marrying a slave] to slavery; where the union was between a free woman and a slave, that of the Lombards and of the Burgundians, condemned both parties to death; but if her parents refused to put her to death, she became a slave of the crown.

The Ripuarian law condemned the female delinquent to slavery; but the woman had the alternative of killing her base-born husband.

All that can be distinctly affirmed is, that, from A.D. 450 to 480, the two principal Frankish tribes were those of the Salian Franks and the Ripuarian Franks, settled, the latter in the east of Belgica, on the banks of the Moselle and the Rhine; the former, towards the west, between the Meuse, the ocean, and the Somme.

He began with the most powerful of the tribes, the Ripuarian Franks.

After Sigebert and the Ripuarian Franks, came the Franks of Terouanne, and Chararic their king.