Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/36

 22 /. BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST Salic or Ripuarian law, besides the Lombards.^ In the fu- ture 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. A system of personal laws implies rules by which a " con- flict of laws " may be appeased, and of late years many of the international or intertribal rules of the Prankish realm have been recovered.^ 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.^ This gave the clergy some interest in the old system. But German and Roman law were mak- ing advances towards each other. If the one was becoming civilized, the other had been sadly barbarized, or rather vulgarized. North of the Alps the current Roman law re- garded Alaric's Lex as its chief authority. In Italy Jus- tinian's Institutes and Code and Julian's epitome of the Novels were known, and someone may sometimes have opened a copy of the Digest. But everywhere the law administered among the Romani seems to have been in the main a tradi- tronal, customary law which paid little heed to written texts. It was, we are told, ein romisches Vulgarrecht, which stood to pure Roman law in the same relation as that in which the vulgar Latin or Romance that people talked stood to the literary language.* Not a few of the rules and ideas which
 * Brunner, op. cit. i. 260. * Ibid. 261 ff.
 * Brunner, op. cit. i. 269 ; Loning, op. cit. ii. 284.
 * Brunner, op. cit. i. 255.