Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/604

 590 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY IV. The Extension of Roman Law after the Fall of the Western Empire Upon the later history of the Roman law and its diffusion through the modern world I can but briefly touch, for I should be led far away from the special topic here considered. The process of extension went on in some slight measure by conquest, but mainly by peaceful means, the less advanced peoples, who had no regular legal system of their own, being gradually influenced by and learning from their more civ- ilized neighbours to whom the Roman system had descended. The light of legal knowledge radiated forth from two centres, from Constantinople over the Balkanic and Euxine countries between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries, from Italy over the lands that lay north and west of her from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. Thereafter it is Germany, Hol- land, and France that have chiefly propagated the impe- rial law, Germany by her universities and writers, France and Holland both through their jurists and as colonizing powers. In the history of the mediaeval and modern part of the process of extension five points or stages of especial import may be noted. The first is the revival of legal study which began in Italy towards the end of the eleventh century a. d., and the prin- cipal agent in which was the school of Bologna, famous for many generations thereafter. From that date onward the books of Justinian, which had before that time been super- seded in the Eastern Empire, were lectured and commented on in the universities of Italy, France, Spain, England, Germany, and have continued to be so till our own day. They formed, except in England (where from the time of Henry the Third onwards they had a powerful and at last a victori- ous rival in the Common Law), the basis of all legal training and knowledge. The second is the creation of that vast mass of rules for the guidance of ecclesiastical matters and courts — courts whose jurisdiction was in the Middle Ages far wider than it is now — which we call the Canon Law. These rules,