The ''Notitia de actoribus regis'' ("Notice concerning royal administrators") is a series of six decrees (''praecepta'') promulgated by the
Lombard king of Italy
The Kings of the Lombards or ''reges Langobardorum'' (singular ''rex Langobardorum'') were the monarchs of the Lombard people from the early 6th century until the Lombardic identity became lost in the 9th and 10th centuries. After 568, the Lombar ...
,
Liutprand, around 733. Collectively they "detailed the duties and responsibilities of the men selected to administer royal ''curtes''," the men referenced as ''actores'' in the title.
[Everett, "Literacy and the Law", 123.] Liutprand was a prolific legislator. Besides the ''Notitia'', he added 152 titles to the ''
Edictum Rothari
The ''Edictum Rothari'' (lit. ''Edict of Rothari''; also ''Edictus Rothari'' or ''Edictum Rotharis'') was the first written compilation of Lombards, Lombard law, codified and promulgated on 22 November 643 by King Rothari in Pavia by a gairethinx, ...
'' of his predecessor.
[Wickham, ''Early Medieval Italy'', 44.] The ''Notitia'' is "essentially a forerunner of the
Carolingian capitulary".
[
The Latin term ''curtis'' (plural ''curtes'') originally denoted "a complex of landed property" and came during the Lombard period to refer to the house of a free man (''liber homo'') with its surrounding buildings and orchards before settling to mean the administrative centre of a lord's estates. Agricultural matters were overseen by a ''villicus'' and domestic ones by a ''ministerialis'' and both were usually of the servile class, '']aldii ''Aldii'' were semifree in Germanic law. Employees of a patron, they had a position intermediate between freedom and slavery but ended up sometimes being confused with the serfs. Deprived of political and military rights and related to the land that ...
''. A lord, such as the king, had many ''curtes'', each with its ''dominicum'' (the demesne
A demesne ( ) or domain was all the land retained and managed by a lord of the manor under the feudal system for his own use, occupation, or support. This distinguished it from land sub-enfeoffed by him to others as sub-tenants. The concept or ...
), the original estate directly administered by the lord's servants, and its ''massaricium'', the manors (''mansi'') owned by the lord but farmed by free or servile peasants. A ''curtis'' could be contiguous but was more often a scattering of domains in several proximal villages; it was thus an administrative, not a geographical, unit.
The main purpose of the ''Notitia'' was to prevent the usurpation of public land by local officials. The first requirement of a potential ''actor'' was to swear on the Gospels
Gospel originally meant the Christian message ("the gospel"), but in the 2nd century it came to be used also for the books in which the message was set out. In this sense a gospel can be defined as a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words an ...
that "if I should learn of anything that is against the regulations, I will make this known 'facio notitiam''to the king, so that the matter will be resolved."[ The term ''notitia'' may indicate a written notice or report, since the written law is itself referred to as part of a ''notitia''. The law further declares that the government was in possession of a "list of all the territories that pertained to those estates".][Everett, "Literacy and the Law", 123: ''per omnes curtes nostras brebi facimus de omni territuria de ipsas curtes pertinentes'' (literally: "for all our ''curtes'' we have briefs of all territory belonging to those ''curtes''").] Any purchase of royal property by one of the king's servants was to be confirmed by a royal charter and the prices were stipulated "in the edict".
Editions
*Georg Pertz
Georg Heinrich Pertz (28 March 17957 October 1876) was a German historian.
Personal life
Pertz was born in Hanover on 28 March 1795. His parents were the court bookbinder Christian August Pertz and Henrietta Justina née Deppen.
He married twi ...
, ed. "Notitia de actoribus regis". ''Mon. Germ. Hist.
The ''Monumenta Germaniae Historica'' (''MGH'') is a comprehensive series of carefully edited and published primary sources, both chronicle and Archives, archival, for the study of Northwestern and Central European history from the end of the Rom ...
'', Leges, IV: 180–82.
Notes
{{Reflist
Sources
*Everett, Nicholas. "Literacy and the Law in Lombard Government". ''Early Medieval Europe'' 2000 9(1): 93–127.
*Tabacco, Giovanni. ''The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy: Structures of Political Rule''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
* Wickham, Christopher. ''Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society, 400–1000''. London: Macmillan, 1981.
Medieval law
Legal history of Italy
733
8th century in law