He also authorized the Salic Law (or Laws of the Salian Franks), a legal text issued between 507 and 511. The Salic Law would be a core component of Frankish law throughout the early Middle Ages, and was still cited in royal succession disputes eight hundred years later, in the fourteenth century.8 Clovis’s reign marked the true beginning of Frankish collective identity—which later became the sense of French nationhood. He is often described as the first real Frenchman.
