The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I. Frederic William Maitland

could now enforce his laws in Italy and this he did by the pragmatic sanction pro petitione Vigilii (554).⁵¹ Fourteen years were to elapse and then the Lombard hordes under Alboin would be pouring down upon an exhausted and depopulated land. Those fourteen years are critical in legal history; they suffer Justinian’s books to obtain a lodgement in the West. The occidental world has paid heavily for Code and Digest in the destruction of the Gothic kingdom, in the temporal power of the papacy, and in an Italy never united until our own day; but perhaps the price was not too high. Be that as it may, the coincidence is memorable. The Roman empire centred in New Rome has just strength enough to hand back to Old Rome the guardianship of her heathen jurisprudence, now “enucleated” (as Justinian says) in a small compass, and then loses for ever the power of legislating for the West. True that there is the dwindling exarchate in Italy; true that the year 800 is still far off; true that one of Justinian’s successors, Constantine IV., will pay Rome a twelve days’ visit (663) and rob it of ornaments that Vandals have spared;⁵² but with what we must call Graeco-Roman jurisprudence, with the Ecloga of Leo the Isaurian and the Basilica of Leo the Wise, the West, if we except some districts of southern Italy,⁵³ has no concern. Two halves of the world were drifting apart, were becoming ignorant of each other’s language, intolerant of each other’s theology. He who was to be the true lord of Rome, if he loathed the Lombard, loved not the emperor. Justinian had taught Pope Vigilius, the Vigilius of the pragmatic sanction, that in the Byzantine system the church must be a department of the state.⁵⁴ The Bishop of Rome did not mean to be the head of a department.

Laws of Æthelbert.During some centuries Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) is one of the very few westerns whose use of the Digest can be proved.⁵⁵ He sent Augustin to England. Then in “Augustin’s day,” about the year 600, Æthelbert of Kent set in writing the dooms of his folk “in Roman fashion.”⁵⁶ Not improbably he had heard of Justinian’s exploits; but the dooms, though already they are protecting with heavy bót the property of God, priests and bishops, are barbarous enough. They are also, unless discoveries have yet to be made, the first Germanic laws that were written in a Germanic tongue. In many instances the desire to have written laws appears so soon as a barbarous race is brought into contact with Rome.⁵⁷ The acceptance of the new religion must have revolutionary consequences in the world of law, for it is likely that heretofore the traditional customs, even if they have not been conceived as instituted by gods who are now becoming devils, have been conceived as essentially unalterable. Law has been the old; new law has been a contradiction in terms. And now about certain matters there must be new law.⁵⁸ What is more, “the example of the Romans” shows that new law can be made by the issue of commands. Statute appears as the civilized form of law. Thus a fermentation begins and the result is bewildering. New resolves are mixed up with statements of old custom in these Leges Barbarorum.

SEVENTH AND EIGHTH CENTURIES. Germanic laws.The century which ends in 700 sees some additions made to the Kentish laws by Hlothær and Eadric, and some others made by Wihtræd; there the Kentish series ends. It also sees in the dooms of Ine the beginning of written law in Wessex.⁵⁹ It also sees the beginning of written law among the Lombards; in 643 Rothari published his edict;⁶⁰ it is accounted to be one of the best statements of ancient German usages. A little later the Swabians have their Lex Alamannorum,⁶¹ and the Bavarians their Lex Baiuwariorum.⁶² It is only in the Karolingian age that written law appears among the northern and eastern folks of Germany, the Frisians, the Saxons, the Angli and Warni of Thuringia, the Franks of Hamaland.⁶³ To a much later time must we regretfully look for the oldest monuments of Scandinavian law.⁶⁴ Only two of our “heptarchic” kingdoms leave us law, Kent and Wessex, though we have reason to believe that Offa the Mercian (ob. 796) legislated.⁶⁵ Even Northumbria, Bede’s Northumbria, which was a bright spot in a dark world, bequeaths no dooms. The impulse of Roman example soon wore out. When once a race has got its Lex, its aspirations seem to be satisfied. About the year 900 Alfred speaks as though Offa (circ. 800), Ine (circ. 700), Æthelbert (circ. 600) had left him little to do. Rarely upon the mainland was there any authoritative revision of the ancient Leges, though transcribers sometimes modified them to suit changed times, and by so doing have perplexed the task of modern historians. Only among the Lombards, who from the first, despite their savagery, seem to show something that is like a genius for law,⁶⁶ was there steadily progressive legislation. Grimwald (668), Liutprand (713–35), Ratchis (746) and Aistulf (755) added to the edict of Rothari. Not by abandoning, but by developing their own ancient rules, the Lombards were training themselves to be the interpreters and in some sort the heirs of the Roman prudentes.

System of personal laws.As the Frankish realm expanded, there expanded with it a wonderful “system of personal laws.”⁶⁷ It was a system of racial laws. The Lex Salica, for example, was not the law of a district, it was the law of a race. The Swabian, wherever he might be, lived under his Alamannic law, or, as an expressive phrase tells us, he lived Alamannic law (legem vivere). So Roman law was the law of the Romani. In a famous, if exaggerated sentence, Bishop Agobard of Lyons has said that often five men would be walking or sitting together and each of them would own a different law.⁶⁸ We are now taught that this principle is not primitively Germanic. Indeed in England, where there were no Romani, it never came to the front, and, for example, “the Danelaw” very rapidly became the name for a tract of land.⁶⁹ But in the kingdoms founded by Goths and Burgundians the intruding Germans were only a small part of a population, the bulk of which was Gallo-Roman, and the barbarians, at least in show, had made their entry as subjects or allies of the emperor. It was natural then that the Romani should live their old law, and, as we have seen,⁷⁰ their rulers were at pains to supply them with books of Roman law suitable to an age which would bear none but the shortest of law-books. It is doubtful whether the Salian Franks made from the first any similar concession to the provincials whom they subdued; but, as they spread over Gaul, always retaining their own Lex Salica, they allowed to the conquered races the right that they claimed for themselves. Their victorious career gave the principle an always wider scope. At length they carried it with them into Italy and into the very city of Rome. It would seem that among the Lombards, the Romani were suffered to settle their own disputes by their own rules, but Lombard law prevailed between Roman and Lombard. However, when Charles the Great vanquished Desiderius and made himself king of the Lombards, the Frankish system of personal law found a new field. A few years afterwards (800) a novel Roman empire was established. One of the immediate results of this many-sided event was that Roman law ceased to be the territorial law of any part of the lands that had become subject to the so-called Roman Emperor. Even in Rome it was reduced to the level of a personal or racial law, while in northern Italy there were many Swabians who lived Alamannic, and Franks who lived Salic or Ripuarian law, besides the Lombards.⁷¹ In the future the renovatio imperii was to have a very different effect. If the Ottos and Henries were the successors of Augustus, Constantine and Justinian, then Code and Digest were Kaiserrecht, statute law for the renewed empire. But some centuries were to pass before this theory would be evolved, and yet other centuries before it would practically mould the law of Germany. Meanwhile Roman law was in Rome itself only the personal law of the Romani.

The vulgar Roman law.A system of personal laws implies rules by which a “conflict of laws” may be appeased, and of late years many of the international or intertribal rules of the Frankish realm have been recovered.⁷² We may see, for example, that the law of the slain, not that of the slayer, fixes the amount of the wergild, and that the law of the grantor prescribes the ceremonies with which land must be conveyed. We see that legitimate children take their father’s, bastards their mother’s law. We see also that the churches, except some which are of royal foundation, are deemed to live Roman law, and in Italy, though not in Frankland, the rule that the individual cleric lives Roman law seems to have been gradually adopted.⁷³ This