Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/75

 IV] TRANSMISSION OP THE ROMAN LAW 67 it was adapting itself to the needs of imperfectly Romanized provincials ; at the centres of Roman gov- ernment and affairs it was entering upon a stage of codification. The changes which the law was under- going in Spain and Gaul were corruptions, in that they represented the adaptation of a developed and intellectual system to the demands of peoples whose mental vision was not broadened to the range of metropolitan life. Yet they were also links in the chain of eventual progress ; for they represented the process of appropriation of the Roman law by races who were to develop these modified legal rules as their own law. The result might be, as in the south of France, a Romanesque law presenting in its growth an analogy to the development of the Romance tongues and literatures out of the Vulgar Latin speech. The people of the provinces had some acquaintance with this provincialized law; but only lawyers or officials were likely to have the larger knowledge of the Roman law as it then existed in imperial codifica- tions and collections. For the emperors were group- ing their edicts into codes and were endeavoring to preserve and protect with their authority the legal attainment of the past. The legislation of Theodosius and Justinian did not arrest the development of Roman law ; rather it preserved the law in a form suited to the understanding of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centu- ries. It cannot even be said that Valentinian's famous "Law of Citations"* or Justinian's prohibition of 1 Theod. Cod., I, IV, 426 a.d. See Muirhead, Hist. Introd. to the Law of Rome, ( 78, for a translation of this enactment, which ao> corded eqaal authority to the writings of Papinlan, Paulus, Gains,