From Grave Robbing to Pastured Pigs: Intratextual References and Legal Thinking in Lombard Law-Books, ca. 1050-1125

Abstract

A seemingly peculiar gloss can be found in two manuscripts of the Lombard laws, each produced around the turn of the twelfth century, stating that King Grimwald’s emendation of the laws on grave robbing (Grimwald, no. 3, issued in 668 ce) should be read in light of a later law of King Liutprand’s regarding the pasturing of pigs in another person’s defended forest (Liutprand, no. 150, issued in 735 ce). I take a manuscript-led perspective to analyse the development of this gloss, primarily focusing on five manuscripts of a variant of the laws edited in the modern day as the Liber Papiensis and dating from the eleventh to early twelfth centuries, but also with reference also to late, comparable instances in some of the twelfth-century manuscripts of the Lombarda variant of the laws. I explore the development of variants of this gloss through its association first with King Rothari’s law issued in 643 ce on the despoliation of corpses found in or by a river, where the gloss is first attested in two manuscripts of the third quarter of the eleventh century. I then turn to the transfer of the gloss to Rothari’s law on grave robbing, in the late eleventh-century manuscripts, and then its further transfer to the law of Grimwald on grave robbing and other crimes when committed by enslaved people, at the turn of the twelfth century. I consider the production and development of the gloss in manuscript contexts and in relation to the centers and peripheries of Lombardist legal studies. Overall, I argue that the gloss served to provide greater granularity in the way that the despoilation of corpses might be understood in socio-legal contexts, and to position graverobbing as comparable to other forms of theft as framed within the laws and legal practice.