What Is the Salic Law?
The Salic Law is the Frankish legal tradition that was used in 1328 to exclude the claim of Edward III of England to the French throne and to justify the accession of Philip, Count of Valois, as Philip VI. The application of the Salic Law in 1328 was a political act, dressed in the language of an ancient legal custom. It was the immediate constitutional cause of the Hundred Years’ War.
The Lex Salica
The Salic Law takes its name from the Salii, a Frankish tribe of the Low Countries. The law was first codified in Latin, at the order of the Merovingian king Clovis I, in the late fifth or early sixth century. The Lex Salica, in the form in which it survives in some 80 manuscripts, is a body of customary law dealing with the inheritance of land, the conduct of feuds, the wergeld, and the procedures of the court. The text most useful for the constitutional question is Title LIX, “De alodis,” and within that title, paragraph 5, the famous clause that excludes women from the inheritance of allodial land: “De terra vero Salica in mulierem nulla portio haereditatis transit, sed ad virilis sexus personas haereditatem perveniat.”
The clause was a property-law provision. It had nothing to do with royal succession, and the Merovingian and Carolingian kings transmitted the throne by a different set of procedures. The Salic Law was the law of the land, not the law of the king.
The 1316 precedent
The first political use of the Salic Law in a French royal succession came in 1316. King Louis X died on 5 June 1316, leaving a daughter, Joan, by his first wife Margaret of Burgundy, and a posthumous son, John I, by his second wife Clementia of Hungary. The infant John I died after five days, on 20 November 1316. The question of who should succeed became a constitutional crisis. Louis’s brother, Philip, count of Poitou, claimed the throne on the basis that women could not inherit the French crown. Joan, who had a stronger claim by primogeniture, was set aside. Philip was crowned as Philip V on 9 January 1317.
The 1316 decision was the precedent. It was also a contested precedent. The French jurists who argued the case for Philip V, in particular the legist Pierre de Béziers, invoked the Salic Law and a series of other sources to support the principle of male succession. The argument was anachronistic. The Salic Law, in its original form, was a property statute, not a constitution.
The 1322 confirmation
The principle was reaffirmed in 1322, when Charles IV succeeded his brother Philip V. Charles IV, like Philip V, was a male heir. The decision was, in form, a confirmation of the 1316 precedent. The juristic case for the Salic Law was strengthened by the work of the legists, in particular Guillaume de Cunh and the later commentator Jacques de Révigny, who attempted to give the principle of male succession a systematic legal foundation.
The 1328 decision
The most important use of the Salic Law came in 1328, when Charles IV died on 1 February 1328 without a male heir. The three principal claimants were:
- Edward III of England, whose mother Isabella was Charles IV’s sister
- Philip, count of Valois, whose father Charles of Valois was the brother of King Philip IV
- Charles II of Navarre, whose mother Joan was a daughter of King Louis X
The Salic Law, as interpreted by the jurists, excluded all three. Edward’s claim passed through his mother Isabella, and Charles of Navarre’s claim passed through his mother Joan. The only male claimant in the direct male line was Philip of Valois. He was chosen by an assembly of French magnates — the duke of Burgundy, the duke of Bourbon, the count of Flanders, the chancellor of France — and was crowned at Reims on 29 May 1328 as Philip VI.
The decision was political. The French magnates, who had just fought the Flemish and the Burgundians in 1314–1325, were not eager to bring an English king to Paris. The Salic Law, in the form it was used in 1328, was a piece of legal dressing for a political choice.
The Edwardian case
The English case, as set out by Edward III in his assertion of the title in 1340, was that the Salic Law could not apply to the French crown, since the French crown was not Salic land. The Capetian kings, the English argued, had transmitted the crown through women in earlier successions; the principle of male succession was an innovation. The English case was, in the strict legal sense, the stronger. The French case was the politically more convenient. The dispute was settled, in the end, by 116 years of war.
The 1830 invocation
The Salic Law continued to be a principle of French royal succession for centuries after 1328. The principle was last invoked in 1830, when the abdication of Charles X triggered the substitution of the Orléanist branch, in the person of Louis-Philippe, for the elder Bourbons. The 1830 application, the standard reading is, is the closing of a constitutional tradition that had begun in 1316. The Salic Law, in French constitutional history, is the principle that the French crown cannot be transmitted through a woman, and that the succession must follow the male line.
The tradition has its own historiography. The legal scholarship of the 16th and 17th centuries — the Leges Salicae of Eccard, the historical work of Du Cange and Dom Bouquet — was the foundation of the modern critical reading. The 19th-century French historians who coined the term “Hundred Years’ War” treated the Salic Law as the constitutional key to the conflict.
Significance
The Salic Law, in the strict sense, is a 6th-century property statute of the Salian Franks. In the constitutional sense, it is a 14th-century invention of the French legists, used to dress a political choice in the language of ancient custom. The 1328 application of the Salic Law to the French crown was the immediate constitutional cause of the war; the long French defence of the principle, in 1328 and for centuries after, was the legal framework within which the war was fought. The English claim to the French throne, formally maintained until the reign of George III, was the other side of the same constitutional argument. The 116 years of the war were, in a real sense, the working-out of a 14th-century legal dispute.