Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/35

 1. MAITLAND: A PROLOGUE 21 has said that often five men would be walking or sitting to- gether and each of them would own a different law. ^ We are now taught that this principle is not primitively Ger- manic. 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.^ But in the kingdoms founded by Goths and Burgundians the intru<J^ ing Germans were only a small part of the 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, 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 Ro- mani were suffered to settle their own disputes by their own rules, but Lombard law prevailed between Roman and Lom- bard. However, when Charles the Great vanquished Desi- derius 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, of Franks who lived contingit ut simul eant aut sedeant quinque homines et nullus eorum communem legem cum altero habeat." » Stubbs, Constit. Hist. i. 216. See, however, Dahn, Konige der Germanen, vii. (3), p. 1 flf.
 * Agobardi Opera, Migne, Patrol, vol. 104, col. 116: "Nam plerumque