[2] It remained the basis of Frankish law throughout the early Medieval period, and influenced future European legal systems.

[citation needed] The recension of Hendrik Kern organizes all of the manuscripts into five families according to similarity and relative chronological sequence, judged by content and dateable material in the text.

[citation needed] Charlemagne goes back even earlier to the Lex Suauorum, the ancient code of the Suebi preceding the Alemanni.

The Salic law code contains the Malberg glosses (German Malbergische Glossen or malbergische Glossen; despite the name, they aren't glosses in the proper sense[13][14]), several deformed[15] Old Frankish,[13][15][16] or for some Dutch scholars Old Dutch, words and what is likely the earliest surviving full sentence in the language:[17] This sentence is also given as the following:[18] These laws and their interpretations give an insight into Frankish society.

The rights of family members were defined; for example, the equal division of land among all living male heirs, in contrast to primogeniture.

One tenet of the civil law is agnatic succession, explicitly excluding females from the inheritance of a throne or fief.

[19]or, another transcript: [C]oncerning terra Salica, no portion or inheritance is for a woman, but all the land belongs to members of the male sex who are brothers.The law merely prohibited women from inheriting ancestral "Salic land"; this prohibition did not apply to other property (such as personal property); and under Chilperic I sometime around the year 570, the law was actually amended to permit inheritance of land by a daughter if a man had no surviving sons (This amendment, depending on how it is applied and interpreted, offers the basis for either Semi-Salic succession or male-preferred primogeniture, or both).

The Merovingian kings divided their realm equally among all living sons, leading to much conflict and fratricide among the rival heirs.

Primogeniture, or the preference for the eldest line in the transmission of inheritance, eventually emerged in France, under the Capetian kings.

Feudal law allowed the transmission of fiefs to daughters in default of sons, which was also the case for the early appanages.

For a remarkably long period, from the inception of the Capetian dynasty in 987 until the death of Louis X in 1316, the eldest living son of the King of France succeeded to the throne upon his demise.

Philip prepared for the contingencies with Odo IV, Duke of Burgundy, maternal uncle of Louis X's daughter and prospective heiress, Joan.

If the unborn child were male, he would succeed to the French throne as king; if female, Philip would maintain the regency until the daughters of Louis X reached their majority.

Agnes of France, daughter of Louis IX, mother of the Duke of Burgundy, and maternal grandmother of the Princess Joan, considered it a usurpation and demanded an assembly of the peers, which Philip V accepted.

On March 27, 1317, a treaty was signed at Laon between the Duke of Burgundy and Philip V, wherein Joan renounced her right to the throne of France.

Isabella of France, sister of Charles IV, claimed the throne for her son, Edward III of England.

The French rejected the claim, noting that "Women cannot transmit a right which they do not possess", a corollary to the succession principle in 1316.

Philip became king without serious opposition, until his attempt to confiscate Gascony in 1337 made Edward III press his claim to the French throne.

In 1358 the monk Richard Lescot invoked it to dispute the claim of Charles II of Navarre to the French crown, an argument that would later be echoed by other jurists in defence of the Valois dynasty.

Prior to the Valois succession, Capetian kings granted appanages to their younger sons and brothers, which could pass to male and female heirs.

The appanages given to the Valois princes, though, in imitation of the succession law of the monarchy that gave them, limited their transmission to males.

Shakespeare says that Charles VI rejected Henry V's claim to the French throne on the basis of Salic law's inheritance rules, leading to the Battle of Agincourt.

The War of the Austrian Succession was triggered by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713, in which Charles VI of Austria, who himself had inherited the Austrian patrimony over his nieces as a result of Salic law, attempted to ensure the inheritance directly to his own daughter Maria Theresa of Austria, which was an example of an operation of quasi-Salic law.

Salic law was also an important issue in the Schleswig-Holstein Question and played a day-to-day role in the inheritance and marriage decisions of common princedoms of the German states, such as Saxe-Weimar, to cite a representative example.

As a remnant of Salic law, the office of the reigning monarch of the Netherlands is always formally known as "King", though her title may be "Queen".

With no other male-line agnates in the remaining branches of the House of Nassau, Grand Duke William IV adopted a quasi-Salic law of succession to allow him to be succeeded by his daughters.

The hostess, a civil, quiet, laborious drudge, came to take his orders for dinner, but declined to make answer on the subject of the horse and guide; for the Salique Law, it seems, extended to the stables of the Golden Candlestick.