The Visigothic Code: Forum Judicum

It was well said by Gibbon that “Laws form the most important portion of a nation’s history,” for from them, more impartially than from any other source, we derive information of the customs, virtues, vices, political ethics, faults, follies, and religious prejudices of a people. Especially is this true of the Visigothic Code. In it are depicted the traditions and history of a race which, originally nomadic, with unprecedented rapidity became stationary; and, from being for ages subject to institutions formed by the desultory acts of tumultuous assemblies, often dictated by caprice and enmity, in less than two generations acknowledged obedience to a government partly imperial, partly theocratic. In the annals of no people so recently barbarian, is to be found more marked and substantial progress, from the primitive surroundings of pastoral and predatory life, to the tastes, the laws, the refinements, and the social usages of civilization.

An analysis of the Visigothic Code may be made under three heads: historical, descriptive, comparative. Its story is practically that of the Gothic monarchy in Spain. In the variety and scope of its provisions; in the skilful adaptation of its canons to the purposes of ecclesiastical supremacy; in the care with which it preserves the distinctions of caste; in the accuracy and conciseness of its maxims defining the principles of equity; in the elaborate, yet simple, arrangement of its judicial system; in the thoroughly philosophical spirit that pervades the greater portion of its pages; it is radically different from, and, in many respects superior to, all other collections of legal enactments of ancient or mediæval times.

It is far more instructive and suggestive than a chronicle. Nowhere have the purposes of the law been more ably stated than in its terse and expressive phraseology. It proclaims the sentiments of a lofty morality. It appreciates the true object and end of legislation. In its stern and inflexible disregard for the arrogant claims of superior wealth and station, it assured to the most lowly the administration of impartial justice.