barbarian kings to have the customary laws of their peoples written down, and the very act of issuing written law codes gave the king more of a role in the law than he had had before.

The man at the head of each group of barbarian people was the king: rex in Latin, the related word in Irish, but cyning ('man from the kin') in Old English (although his kingdom was the rice). In Ireland there were several grades of king: the ordinary king of the tribe (rí túaithe), the tribal king who was overlord over other tribal kings (ruiri), the provincial king (rí ruirecb, or 'king of kings'); some ambitious kings even claimed to be high king of all Ireland, or king of Tara (ardrí, rí Temra). There are signs that this hierarchy of kingship was shared by some Germanic peoples, even after the political turmoil caused by the invasions had altered the traditional patterns. The Franks seem to have been ruled by a number of tribal kings before the emergence of the Merovingian dynasty, which eliminated other royal families, and mysterious personages called subreguli, principes, or duces regii in early Latin documents from England may be the equivalent of tribal kings. There is even an English equivalent to the ardrí, the bretwealda, or 'ruler of Britain': this too probably represents ambition as much as reality. Some peoples may have only elected 'overkings' in times of emergency: Bede says that the Saxons on the Continent did not have a king, but were ruled by 'satraps' (tribal kings?) and only when war threatened the whole people did they elect a war-leader. Where political circumstances did not create a need for permanent war-leaders, as among the Irish, Saxons, or Scandinavians, powerful kings with large kingdoms did not emerge. The Frankish and Anglo-Saxon kings were primarily war-leaders, which is not true of their Irish or continental Saxon equivalents.

This is one of the most important distinctions between those barbarian peoples who migrated and those who stayed put. The process of migration broke up old tribal groupings, and the often stormy circumstances brought war-leaders to the fore. Those war-leaders gathered warriors around them, who were rewarded with the spoils of war: gold, precious objects, but above all land. Small, relatively unstratified rural communities,

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