in the Christian tendency of many interpolations;[1] in the fact that the constitutions relative to ecclesiastical law, which had been put at the end even in the Theodosian codex, were now placed at the beginning; and very markedly in the preambles of many of the Novels. Yet the book is not a beginning, but an end. Latin, which had long become valueless, now disappears completely from legal life (even the Novels are mostly in Greek), and with it the work so misguidedly written in that language. But the history of the law pursues the way that the Syrian-Roman law-book had indicated to it, and in the eighth century arrives at works in the mode of our eighteenth, such as the Ecloga of the Emperor Leo[2] and the Corpus of the great Persian jurist Archbishop Jesubocht.[3] In that time, too, came the greatest figure of Islamic jurisprudence, Abu Hanifah.
VII
The law-history of the West begins in total independence of Justinian's creation. At that time it was in complete oblivion, so thoroughly unimportant, in fact, that of its main element, the Pandects (Digest), there was but one manuscript, which by accident (an unfortunate one) was discovered about 1050.
The pre-Cultural phase, from about a.d. 500, had thrown up a series of Germanic tribal codes—the Visigothic, Ostrogothic, Burgundian, Frankish, and Lombard—which correspond to those of the Arabian pre-Culture that survives for us only in the Jewish[4] Deuteronomy (c. 621, more or less our Deuteronomy xii-xxvi) and Priestly History (c. 450, now represented by the second, third, and fourth books of the Pentateuch). Both are concerned with the values of basic significance for a primitive existence—family and chattels—and both make use, crudely, yet shrewdly, of an old and civilized law—the Jews (and no doubt the Persians and others) working upon the late Babylonian,[5] and the Germans upon some few relics of Urbs Roma.
The political life of the Gothic springtime, with its peasant, feudal, and simple burgher laws, leads very soon to particular development in three great branches of law which have remained distinct to this day—and there has been no unifying comparative history of law in the West to probe the deep meaning of this development.
The most important by far, owing to the political destinies in which it was involved, was the Norman law, which was borrowed from the Frankish. After the Conquest of England in 1066, this drove out the native Saxon, and since
- ↑ Wenger, p. 180.
- ↑ Krumbacher, Byzantinische Literatur-Geschichte, p. 606.
- ↑ Sachau, Syrische Rechtsbücher, Vol. III.
- ↑ Bertholet, Kulturgeschichte Israels, pp. zoo, et seq.
- ↑ We ger a hint of this in the famous code of Hammurabi, though unfortunately we cannot tell in what relation this single work stood, in point of intrinsic importance, to the general level of contemporary jurisprudence in the Babylonian world.
