Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/45

 1. MAITLAND: A PROLOGUE 31 as older than or uninfluenced by the work of the Bolognese glossators. One critic discovers evanescent traces of a school of law at Rome or at Ravenna which others cannot see. The current instruction of boys in grammar and rhetoric in- volved some discussion of legal terms. Definitions of lex and ius and so forth were learnt by heart ; little catechisms were compiled ; * but of anything that we should dare to call an education in Roman law there are few, if any, indis- putable signs before the school of Bologna appears in the second half of the eleventh century. As to the Digest, dur- ing some four hundred years its mere existence seems to have been almost unknown. It barely escaped with its life. When men spoke of " the pandects " they meant the Bible.* The romantic fable of the capture of an unique copy at the siege of Amalfi in 1135 has long been disproved; but, if some small fragments be neglected, all the extant manu- scripts are said to derive from two copies, one now lost, the other the famous Florentina, written, we are told, by j Greek hands in the sixth or seventh century. In the eleventh jj the revival began. In 1038 Conrad II, the emperor whom Cnut saw crowned, ordained that Roman law should be once more the territorial law of the city of Rome.^ In 1076 the Digest was cited in the judgment of a Tuscan court.* Then, about 1100, Irnerius was teaching at Bologna.^ Here, again, there is room for controversy. It is said that he was not self-taught; it is said that neither his theme nor his method was quite new ; it is said that he had a predecessor at Bologna, one Pepo by name. All this may be true and is probable enough: and yet undoubtedly he was soon regarded as the founder of the school which was d'Isidore de Sdville, 1896. ' Conrat, op. cit. i. 65. the most industrious research has failed to prove that between 603 and 1076 any one cited the Digest. The bare fact that Justinian had issued such a book seems to have vanished from memory. Conrat, op. cit. i. 69. "In dated documents Irnerius (his name seems to have really been Warnerius, Guarnerius) appears in 1113 and disappears in 1135. The University of Bologna kept 1888 as its octocentenarv.
 * See E. J. Tardif, Extraits et abrdgds juridiques des ^tymologiea
 * M. G. Leges, ii. 40; Conrat, op. cit. i. 62.
 * Ficker, Forschungen, iii. 126, iv. 99 ; Conrat, op. cit. 67. Apparently