Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/349

 10. BRYCE: ROME AND ENGLAND 335 the old customs of the nation, which had been for the most part preserved by oral tradition, were written down, being no doubt modified in the process. 2. The days of the First and Second Punic Wars, when the growth of population and trade, the increase of the number of foreigners resident in Rome, and the conquest by Rome of territories outside Italy, began to induce the development of the Praetorship as an office for expanding and slowly remodelling the law. 3. The end of the Republic and early days of the Empire, when there was a brilliant development of juridical litera- ture, when the opinions of selected jurists received legal authority from the Emperor's commission, when the Senate was substituted for the popular assemblies as the organ of legislation, and when the administration of the provinces was resettled on a better basis — all these changes inducing a more rapid progress of legal reform. 4. The reigns of Diocletian and Constantine, when impe- rial legislation took a fresh and vigorous start, and when the triumph of Christianity brought a new, a powerful, and a widely pervasive force into the field of politics and legislation. 6. The reign of Justinian, when the plan of codification "whose outlines Julius Caesar had conceived, and which Theo- dosius II had done something to carry out, was at last completed by the inclusion of the whole law of Rome in two books containing the pith of the then existing law, and when many sweeping reforms were effected by new legislation. It is less easy to fix upon epochs of conspicuous change in English legal institutions and law, because English develop- ment has been on the whole more gradual, and because the territorial limits of the area affected by change have not expanded to anything like the same extent as did the terri- tories that obeyed Rome. Rome was a City which grew to be the civilized world: the Urbs became Orbis Terrarum. The English were, and remain, a people inhabiting the southern part of an island, and beyond its limits they have expanded history of the law goes on to a. d. 1204, and in a sense even to a. d. 1453, in an unbroken stream, the codes issued by the later Emperors, and especially the Basilica of Leo the Philosopher, being based upon Justin- ian's redaction.