Post-Roman barbarians went round inventing bodies of law – these codes did not have to be effective in practice or original in contents… they were important more as the special property of a gens; they were things to which one gave one’s allegiance.

Earliest of the extant law codes is known as the Code of Euric, the king who completed the conquest of Gaul south of the Loire and west of the Rhone (474).

Code known as the Breviary was promulgated on 2 Feb 506 under direction of count Goiaric (though it was the work of Alaric II and his advisers). It was published in an assembly held at Toulouse.

Breviary contained an abridgement of the Codex Theodosianus together with most of the C5th imperial Novellae with Interpretationes.

Then comes an epitome of the four books of the Institutes of Gaius, then the books of Sententiae attributed to Julius Paulus, and one chapter of Papinian’s Responsa. The compilation closes with an epitome of Gregorian and Hermogenian codes (both made in tetrarchic period).

What’s most striking about the Breviary is that – although much smaller in scale – it mirrors Justinian’s intention three decades later! It represented an attempt to cope with some of the practical problems of the functioning late Roman judicial system.

The corpus of imperial legislation, basically the Theodosian Code and the Novels, was pruned, simplified and adapted.

The success of the breviary can be gauged from the fact that numerous manuscripts were copied despite the fact the Visigothic kingdom in Gaul was to be overthrown little more than a year after its promulgation.

It’s not an exaggeration therefore to say the Breviary was the main source of Roman law in the West from C6th onwards. Hardly any copies of Theodosian Code proper have survived, the Breviary took its place.

Amusingly, even the Visigothic origins of the code came to be forgotten. From C8th onwards the Franks saw it as the best reduction of Roman law and saw it as Roman law – its most authentic/authoritative iteration.

Carolingians had a funny practice of encouraging the “personality” of law – in other words allowing individuals the right to be judged by what was thought to be his ancestral law.

Similarities between barbarian codes & C7th East Roman Farmer’s Law suggest a common grounding of all of them in Roman vulgar law.

Assumption that lex salica must constitute a codification of tribal custom gains no support from a survey of other codes. Such elements in them that seem to reflect non-Roman society can be understood as attempts by legislators to relate their regulations to social realities.

Lex Salica was prob a collection of early Frankish edicts (removed from their original contexts). By C8th this collection had come to take on an ideological significance, as supposedly representing the ancestral legal codes of the Salian Franks.

THE END