Editing Salic law (section)

===Carolingian phase===
Family III is split into two divisions. The first, comprising three manuscripts, dated to the eighth–ninth centuries, presents an expanded text of 99 or 100 titles. The Malberg Glosses are retained. The second division, with four manuscripts, not only drops the glosses, but also "bears traces of attempts to make the language more concise".<ref name=Kernxvii>{{harvnb|Kern|1880|p=xvii}}.</ref> A statement gives the provenance: "in the 13th year of the reign of our most glorious king of the Franks, Pipin".<ref name=Kernxvii/> Some of the internal documents were composed after the reign of [[Pepin the Short]], but it is considered to be an emendation initiated by Pepin, so is termed the ''Pipina Recensio''.

Family IV also has two divisions – the first comprised 33 manuscripts; the second, one manuscript. They are characterized by the internal assignment of Latin names to various sections of different provenances. Two of the sections are dated to 768 and 778, but the emendation is believed to be dated to 798, late in the reign of [[Charlemagne]]. This edition calls itself the ''Lex Salica Emendata'', or the ''Lex Reformata'', or the ''Lex Emendata'', and is clearly the result of a law code reform by Charlemagne.<ref name="Kernxvii"/>

By that time, Charlemagne's [[Holy Roman Empire]] comprised most of Western Europe. He added laws of choice (free will) taken from the earlier law codes of Germanic peoples not originally part of Francia. These are numbered into the laws that were there, but they have their own, quasisectional title. All the Franks of Francia were subject to the same law code, which retained the overall title of ''Lex Salica''. These integrated sections borrowed from other Germanic codes are the ''[[Lex Ripuaria|Lex Ribuariorum]]'', later ''Lex Ribuaria'', laws adopted from the [[Ripuarian Franks]], who, before Clovis, had been independent. The ''[[Lex Alamannorum]]'' took laws from the [[Alamanni]], then subject to the Franks. Under the Franks, they were governed by Frankish law, not their own. The inclusion of some of their law as part of the Salic law must have served as a palliative.{{citation needed|date=May 2017}} Charlemagne goes back even earlier to the ''Lex Suauorum'', the ancient code of the [[Suebi]] preceding the Alemanni.