Salic Lawdy

The recent hard-hitting news regarding the laws of succesion in Britain offer me the excuse to expound a little on one of the more substantial choices made by Clovis I.

Clovis was the guy who laid down the law a millenium and a half ago.  The codes resulting were a formal recording of traditions both ancient and diverse:  Clovis ruled a domain comprised both of his own people, the Franks, and Gallo Romans - those people in Gaul who were a part of the imperial legacy, then beginning to wane (Clovis' first battle, in The Ax and the Vase, is fought in alliance with Odovakar, who deposed the last Roman emperor), but boasting still a significant local population in what became France.

There was a vogue in any case, at that time, for codification.  The Visigoths had done it, Alaric II having laid down a breviary, and certainly Roman influence had its power.  For Clovis, too, the stipulation of legal terms served to this advantage:  to unite in common policy a disparate set of peoples.  Under Salic Law, the Franks and Gallo Romans were treated as one - both using the ancient northern traditions of his people as a template, and by innovating within those practices.


Salic Law has become a synonym, over time, for male primogeniture, and has been cited for centuries both with fervency and with loathing as the cause to withhold estate from women.  The Plantagenets were born after The Anarchy, a long and bloody war which arose for the sole reason that a woman was given to inherit.  Henry VIII's incomprehension of even the idea of a female HEIR rewrote Clovis' own Catholic legacy in western history.  There's rather a long and delicious post about the irony in that, come to think  of it.

But to my point.  Clovis's code, or the central tenet as contenporary history now sees the phrase as centering upon, is about to be rewritten in Britain.

Maybe.

Of course, it will take the many commonwealths and pieces (again ironic) of a definitely-waned empire to ratify this.  But female primogeniture may at last be legitimized.  Assuming natal legitimacy itself, of course.


***


I think about the generations and centuries since St. Clotilde swayed a husband ... and I think about the life I live, one and a half thousand years later, and sometimes I see similarities.  Yet the power I own (greater by far than any woman who EVER could have sat on England's throne, or indeed ever has) is unimaginably distant from hers.

More terrifyingly - the autonomy I claim is scarcely a hair's-breadth from the chattel-leine.  From the queen subject to a husband by divine right - and from every one of his thousands upon thousands of feminine subjects, unable to inherit, bereft of personal agency.  From the factory working mother, or daughter, chained up within the Industrial Revolution.  From my grandmother in her own factory.  From the secretary of sixty years ago.  From my mother, who with her coworkers colluded never to let one of their number be alone with the boss in the bank vault.  From even myself - a secretary because, even when I was coming out, there was still a degree to which typing was the way to make money.

My fingers fly now - and I am recognized - and I love what I do.  I no longer apologize for my occupation.

But I know that the impulse is there precisely because its obsolete echo is "this is what a woman can do."  Just because I can write a novel now:  doesn't mean I didn't get this skill as a backup to that interest in theater my parents were nervous about.  I didn't want to be a teacher.  I became a clerical worker.

There are millions of women my age who did "better" - but that is because what I do was anathema.  Terrifying.  I am that same hair's-breadth distant from being a nurse, a housewife, a mother, a whore.  I wonder whether others who entered fields as traditional as secretarying is harbor the same awareness of the conflict of "tradition" in this context.  There ARE still women who become teachers not out of vocation, but because that is the acceptable way for a woman to make enough money for her family to live - because it looks good at church - because mama and daddy said - because they feared to reach for "more" ...

... who feel guilty for not getting a "better" job, because, after all, they are so darn bright.

Who couldn't THINK of anything else to do even in the milieu of college.  Distracted by theater nerds, English classes, and the repulsiveness of business and marketing degrees.  Intimidated by science.  Unable to find the right entry point in history.


I am so much closer to the thousands of years, hundreds of generations of women who make up the history of the world - and whom Salic Law (and those ancient traditions so like it, replicated the world over) prevented inheriting.  Prevented power - by money.  I'm part of the nineteenth-century dust, the primeval red clay, the centuries-old winds of my old-fashioned hometown - my old-fashioned family - my anachronistic (in both directions) self.


***


And yet.

I have come into ownership.  I am laden with gratitude - and larded with blessings.  Power my mom even marvels at a bit.

The memory of the first time my granny ever visited my house - walking around the lot with her, going around the front yard - when she asked me, "How many husbands do you mean to marry, to keep a house like this?" - and did NOT mean, how will I get myself supported:  but how much of a harem of men would I have, in my beautiful estate.  I remember her glee, and her beautiful nervousness.

Granma had the most luminescent nervousness.  And nothing quite cowed her like accomplishment.  You could see the wonder in her, sometimes - at the extensive family she and my granddaddy amassed, generation on generation.  I remember sitting with her at her 90th.  "Look what you did grandma."  Her amazing smile.  When she was most excited, she was a little bit afraid.  "How many husbands will you have?"

Not a one, Granny.  But not for lack of loving.

I'm soclose to powerlessness.  I'm still just a secretary.  I'm an underachiever at heart.

But ... in action ... I am something so much greater.  Somewhere along the line, that hair's breadth came into existence.  I may not be far from the long history of women in subjection.  But I am not a part of it.  The hair's breadth isn't a wide barrier.

But it lies between me, my mom, my granny.  It lies between me and Clotilde.  Between me and every English queen - regnant, or not.

My grandmother used to exclaim, "Oh my lands!" and it meant something different.

But I have my own land.  I have paid it off, alone, and own a significant swath of a beautiful, enviable lot, a good patch of a cheering, lovely home.  Oh MY lands.

And women will inherit from me.  Only women - my nieces, when they are grown - a fantasy of perfect joy, imagining the women THEY will be.

And they are salish dwellers, themselves.  Like Saint Clotilde.  We all make a circle.

And now  we can own what we all encompass.  It's only a hair's breadth.

It is enough.  In my case - in the end - a bounty.