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The Roman law was the creation of the genius of Rome and also the product of the complex civilization of which Rome was the kinetic centre. As the Roman power crumbled, Teutonic invaders established kingdoms within territories formerly subject to Rome and to her law—a law, however, which commonly had been modified to suit the peoples of the provinces. Those territories retained their population of provincials. The invaders, Burgundians, Visigoths, and Franks, planting themselves in the different parts of Gaul, brought their own law, under which they continued to live, but which they did not force upon the provincial population. On the contrary, Burgundian and Visigothic kings promulgated codes of Roman law for the latter. And these represent the forms in which the Roman law first passed over into modes of acceptance and application no longer fully Roman, but partly Teutonic and incipiently mediaeval. They exemplify, moreover, the fact, so many aspects of which have been already noticed, of transitional and partly barbarized communities drawing from a greater past according to their simpler needs.

One may say that these codes carried on processes of decline from the full creative genius of Roman jurisprudence, which had irrevocably set in under the Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. The decline lay in a weakening of the intellectual power devoted to the law and its development. The living growth of the praetorian edict had long since come to an end; and now a waning jurisprudential intelligence first ceased to advance the development of law, and then failed to save from desuetude the achieved jurisprudence of the past. So the jurisprudential and juridical elements (jus) fell away from the law, and the imperial constitutions (leges) remained the sole legal vehicle and means of amendment. The need of codification was felt, and that preserving and eliminating process was entered upon.

Roman codification never became a reformulation. The Roman Codex was a collection of existing constitutions. A