Free of judges
In the high Middle Ages is schöffenbarfrei ( scepenbar vri ) a professional title similar semper free . What is meant by this has never been completely clarified. The term plays an important role in the Sachsenspiegel and appears quite often in documents from the 12th and 13th centuries in northern and western Germany.
As their name suggests, the jury- free people occupy the jury's bench in the county court ( the jury should seek the count's court at Königsbann every eighteen weeks , Ssp. Ldr. I / 2), so that the entire jurisdiction in the more important cases is in hand this state lies. The jury's chairs were inherited within certain families (e.g. Ssp. Ldr. III / 26,2), but basically every man who was not a lay judge took part in the jurisdiction of the royal court, regardless of whether he owned a jury or not: who but who was not born to the pews, should ask for the chair with judgment, in order to find another judgment. So the one who found the first judgment should vacate him (Ssp. Ldr. II / 12,13).
The Sachsenspiegel shows that jury members were allowed to sit in judgment on anyone in the empire, but could only be judged by their own kind. Peasants or citizens therefore had no judicial power over this class. Even princes were not allowed to presume to judge a free aldermen.
Incidentally, the electorate-free people played the typical role of a nobility that was very keen on equality - they were undoubtedly considered to be knightly - but they often seem to have been much more numerous and to have lived in much more modest circumstances than is generally assumed for the nobility. According to some documents, people who were not eligible for a lay judge sometimes lived in large numbers in one and the same village or at least in nearby neighboring villages. In this, however, the jury members would have resembled the lower Polish nobility, the Szlachta . Some of its relatives formed their own aristocratic villages and farmed.
The people who were not eligible for judges apparently supported the system of (immediate) royal rule, which preceded the emergence of the territorial principalities from the 14th century. They only paid homage to the king . With the emergence of the states and the mediatization of the counties , the people who were not eligible for electoral law were apparently absorbed into the ministeriality of the sovereigns. Numerous documents from the 13th / 14th Century prove the takeover of the free people of whole regions in the ministry of the rising sovereigns.
Some legal historians such as Philipp Heck , however, consider the jury free as (non-aristocratic) "ordinary citizens". They had not enjoyed any privileges, rather "non-citizens" were underprivileged. Accordingly, their social position would have resembled that of the free in antiquity.
However, this opinion contradicts the explanations z. B. of Eicke von Repgow, who himself was free of schöffenbar and wrote the Sachsenspiegel and defined the statuses there. For example, members of the 5th Army Shield were free from jury members and could give fiefs to members of the 6th Army Shield - to ministerial servants.
The high medieval lay judge's court at Königsbann lived on in the late Middle Ages in the peasant (sometimes also urban) remote courts and free courts .
See also
literature
- Philipp Heck : Contributions to the history of the stands in the Middle Ages. Volume 2: The Sachsenspiegel and the free classes. With linguistic contributions by Albert Bürk. Niemeyer, Halle 1905.