ipse ... deliberare minime possit,"[60] he could call some of the freemen to assist him:  “advocis [advocet] alios ... qui sciunt judicare,"[61] etc., but this seems, in later times at any rate, to have been a privilege to be used at discretion, and the persons summoned were not regularly appointed officers of the court.  The Lombard codes are silent with regard to these indicators; but Savigny,[62] in his argument to prove their existence, claims that mention is made of them in two decisions of Liutprand of the years 715 and 716, and brings as additional evidence a placitum of 751[63] in which Lupo, duke of Spoleto, gives judgment “una cum judicibus nostris ... vel aliis pluribus astantibus,” etc.  It is of more importance for us, however, to determine the reasons for the introduction into Italy by Charlemagne of the new office of the scabinus, than to lose ourselves in a complicated discussion of the theoretical predecessors of these officers.

The introduction of this new feature into city government seems to have been the result of an attempt to correct certain abuses in the exercise of power by the duke or head of the courts of the civitas.  The duke had the right, as we know, to summon all the freemen in his jurisdiction to his placita, and to fine them according to the law if they failed to answer his summons.  The fines collected in this manner formed a substantial part of the revenues of the judex imposing them, and consequently arose the abuse, which seems to have been a great cause of complaint in the eighth century, that the freemen were summoned to attend placita at frequent intervals during the year, when there was no business of any importance to transact, and when the sole object of the summons was to furnish an excuse for imposing the fine.  An attempt to remedy this injustice was made when the number of placita which any one judex could hold during the year was limited by law to three,[64] and the dates for these definitely determined.  But the abuse does not seem to have been satisfactorily corrected till the time when Charlemagne formally substituted for the body of the freemen, who in theory were supposed to attend the placita and assist in the judgments, a limited number of men who, as regularly constituted judges, either assisted the judices or made judgments of their own, as the case might be.  These officers were the scabini, whose position we are now investigating.

All of the best authorities agree that no authentic allusion to the office in Italy is to be found prior to the establishment of Frankish rule.  The word scavinus or scabinus sometimes occurs, but in every case the document containing it has been proved spurious on other grounds.  For instance, Brunetti[65] publishes a donation of the bishop Speciosus of Florence, to the monastery of the cathedral, purporting to belong to the year 724, in which a certain “Alfuso