Law-enforcing powers were delegated by the state to regional and village chieftains, but only as long as it is in accordance with the royal codes. The locals were strongly discouraged from enforcing justice of their own, as taking legal matters in your own hands was also against the law. Though officially judged by the magistrates, the village councils, which were to be elected to start and conduct the criminal proceedings, were the root of the inquisitor-type examinations in Serbia, which were cut with the fall of the state, and failed to develop into similar Western Europe counterpart. The proceedings were called "general investigation". Stealing was one of the major concern of the code. The council would first have to establish if the person is indeed guilty of stealing and then whether this person is a "well known thief", meaning that he has, in modern terms, "criminal history". If a village would harbor such a thief, the entire village would be resettled, and the villagers were obliged to pay the damage to the victim. The punishment for professional thieves was blinding. Thieves who were on the "lower level" were punished with some sort of body mutilation: cutting of the pieces of ears, or the entire noses and hands in some harsher or repeated crimes. Modern crime scholars consider this a rudimentary criminal records: by seeing what was cut on some criminal, you could see how far he progressed in his crimes.