Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/52

 38 /. BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST beyond those bounds which have hitherto been deemed inex- orable. The criminal and the reformer are alike law-break- ers. The criminal is the man who endeavours to return to a state of things which society has once practised, but has condemned as the result of experience. The murderer, the thief, the bigamist, are unfortunate survivals from a bygone age. The reformer is the man who advocates what society has hitherto deemed unlawful, because it has not been tried. And so, when we read our Barbarian Codes, and find that they say a good deal about summoning to courts, about rules of inheritance, about foul language, and a very great deal about money compensation for acts of violence, we shall begin dimly to picture to ourselves an older state of things, in which differences of opinion were settled by clubs and spears, in which (whatever the reason) a dead man's belong- ings did not pass to his relatives, in which the most virulent abuse was common pleasantry, and in which the blood feud, itself, doubtless, a step towards better things, was treated as a fine art. Many other features of the Leges Barbarorum deserve to be noticed ; but space forbids the mention of more than one. They are laws of peoples, not of places. Even during the later Middle Ages, even in our own day, the principle, that all persons living in a certain place are subject to the law of that place, has to submit to substantial exceptions. In the days which followed the downfall of the Roman Em- pire, the principle was not recognized at all. The provin- cials of Gaul, at the time of the Teutonic invasions, lived under a great and uniform system, devised by the jurists and officials of the Roman empire, and embodied in the Theo- dosian Code and other monuments. The invaders had no thought of depriving them of this privilege. They did in- deed, in some cases, publish special codes for their Roman subjects ; and so we get a Lex Romana Wisigothorum, a Lex Romana Burgundiomim and (possibly) a Lex Romana Curi- ensis. But it seems again probable, that these compilations are merely attempts to settle inevitable conflicts of legal principles ; and, in any case, it is worthy of notice that they are full of references to the Theodosian Code, the Sentences