In local administration the king relies, outside the tribal duchies, on
counts whose districts are subdivisions of the old national provinces.
The count, often a hereditary official, is a royal deputy for all
purposes, military and civil. He collects the royal dues, leads the free
men to the host, maintains the peace and administers justice. His
tribunal is the old Germanic hundred-court, in which the free suitors
ought to be the judges; but the suitors for this purpose are represented
by a few doomsmen (_scabini_) chosen for their respectability and
knowledge of the law. They are an ineffectual check upon the count, and
it is a standing difficulty to find ways and means of compelling these
local viceroys to act with common honesty. For this purpose the king
annually appoints itinerant inspectors (_missi dominici_); in twos
and threes they are dispatched on circuit to acquaint the count with
royal instructions, to promulgate new legislation, and above all to
receive and adjudicate upon the complaints of all who are oppressed. A
comparatively late expedient, and the first part of the Carolingian
system to disappear, these tours of inspection were the one safeguard
against local misgovernment and the feudalising of official power. When
they ceased, the Carolingian county too often became a hereditary fief
exploited for the lord's sole benefit.

The Empire was not intended to supersede this system of royal
government; kings no less than emperors were regarded as holding a
definite rank and office in the Christian commonwealth. No traditions of
imperial bureaucracy, except in a debased and orientalised form, were
accessible to Charles the Great. In Gaul and Italy he had subjects who
lived under a corrupt and mutilated Roman Law; but he was unacquainted
with the scientific principles of the great jurists whose writings were
the highest achievements of the Roman genius. To the best minds of the
eighth century the Roman Empire appeared, not as to an Athaulf or a