Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/360

 346 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S Some thirty years before the enactment of Justinian's Codex and Digest (which, though intended for the whole Empire, did not come into force in such Western provinces as had already been lost) three collections of law had been made by three barbarian kings for the governance of their Roman subjects. These were the Edictum of Theodorich, King of the East Goths, published in a. d. 500, the Lex Jtomana Visigothorum, commonly called the Breviarium Ala- ricianum, published by Alarich II, King of the West Goths (settled in Aquitaine and Spain), in a, d. 506, a year before his overthrow by Clovis, and the Lex Romana Biir gundionum, published by the Burgundian King Sigismund in the begin- ning of the sixth century. These three compilations, each of which consists of a certain number of imperial Constitutions, with extracts from a few jurists, ought to be considered in relation to Justinian's work, partly because each of them did for a part of the Roman West what he did for the East, and, as it turned out, for Italy and Sicily also, when Beli- sarius reconquered those countries for him, and partly because they were due to the same need for accessible abridgements of the huge mass of confused and scattered law which prompted the action of Justinian himself. They are parts, of the same movement, though they have far less importance than Justinian's work, and, unlike his, include little or no new law. The main cause of the tendency to consolidate the law and make it more accessible was the profusion with which Diocletian and his successors had used their legislative power, flooding the Empire with a mass of ordinances which few persons could procure or master, together with the decline of legal talent and learning, which made judges and advocates unable to comprehend, to appropriate and to apply the philosophical principles and fine distinctions stored up in the treatises of the old jurists. Here, therefore, political and intellectual conditions, conditions rather of decline than of progress, lay at the root of the phenomenon. But in the case of Justinian something must also be credited to the enlightened desire which he, or Tribonian for him, had con- ceived of removing the complexities, irregularities and dis-