Why did a successful claimant have to enforce a Germanic court judgment personally?

In the context of early Germanic law, a successful claimant was required to enforce a court judgment personally against the defendant’s person or property because the law was not yet administered by a centralized state authority with its own enforcement apparatus.12

During this period, law was primarily viewed as the custom of a specific tribe rather than a set of rules imposed by a central government. Because the legal system lacked a professional bureaucracy or state-controlled police force to execute judicial decisions, the responsibility for ensuring compliance rested entirely with the individual who had won the case. This reflected a social structure where legal outcomes were closely tied to the power of the sib (clan) and the personal capacity of freemen to defend their rights.21