Capitulary

A capitulary (Medieval Latin capitulare) was a series of legislative or administrative acts emanating from the Frankish court of the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties, especially that of Charlemagne, the first emperor of the Romans in the west since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the late 5th century. They were so called because they were formally divided into sections called capitula (plural of capitulum, a diminutive of caput meaning "head(ing)": chapters). As soon as the capitulary was composed, it was sent to the various functionaries of the Frankish Empire, archbishops, bishops, missi dominici and counts, a copy being kept by the chancellor in the archives of the palace. The last emperor to draw up capitularies was Lambert, in 898. At the present day we do not possess a single capitulary in its original form; but very frequently copies of these isolated capitularies were included in various scattered manuscripts, among material of a very different nature, ecclesiastical or secular. A number has been found in books which go back as far as the 9th or 10th centuries. Recent editions note the manuscripts from which a capitulary has been collated. Such capitularies make provisions of a varied nature: it was necessary at an early date to classify them into chapters according to the subject. In 827 Ansegisus, abbot of St. Wandrille at Fontenelle, made such a collection. He arranged them in four books: one grouped together the ecclesiastical capitularies of Charlemagne, another the ecclesiastical capitularies of Louis I, Charlemagne's son, another the secular capitularies of Charlemagne, and yet another the secular capitularies of Louis, bringing together similar provisions and suppressing duplicates. This collection soon acquired official status: after 829 Louis the Pious refers to it, citing book and section. New capitularies were naturally promulgated after 827, and so it was that by 858 there had appeared a second collection in three books, compiled by an author calling himself Benedictus Levita.