THE SEVENTH-CENTURY KINGDOM 127significance as terms implying 'people' and 'homeland' is important.
The lack of qualification in racial distinction seems further evidence
of the breaking down of division between Romans and Goths, and
the aspiration towards a common homeland for a single people is
suggestive of the advances that the society was making.
In the later part of the reign of Reccesuinth, and for the whole of
that of Wamba, no full councils of the whole Visigothic Church were
held, possibly a reflection of the unpalatable features of VIII Toledo.
When the next plenary session was held it was that of XII Toledo of
681, at which the dominant personality was that of Bishop Julian,
the former pupil of Eugenius II. Once again criticisms of a ruler
were voiced, now directed against the recently deposed Wamba. The
bishops criticised him for his uncanonical actions in creating new
bishoprics, notably one in the suburbs of Toledo, while the new king
Ervig repealed his predecessor's law ordaining loss of legal status for
those who failed to attend the mobilisation of the army when sum-
moned or who deserted from it.^68
Once more an attack on what were regarded as arbitrary and ex-
cessive uses of royal authority was swiftly followed by promulgation of
a new law code, Ervig's revision of that of Reccesuinth. It can hardly
be coincidental that the only two major outbursts of public criticism
of the monarchy recorded in Visigothic Spain should be so closely
linked in time with the issue of codes. Laws could be and were made
without requiring the labour of a full codification, as the substantial
corpus of those of Chindasuinth shows. But the codes were more
than systematic handbooks; they were also statements of principles,
and it is hard not to see those of Reccesuinth and Ervig as products
of hard thinking about the limitations and obligations of the royal
office. Such an approach to the contemporary significance of the
codes is perhaps confirmed by the case of the subsequent confirma-
tion, not only of the civil but also of the ecclesiastical laws by the late
tenth-century king of Leon Vermudo II, whose succession, like that
of Ervig, was contentious and divisive.^69
The evidence of the laws and councils, difficult as it sometimes is
to interpret, indicates development rather than stagnation in the
Visigothic kingdom in the later seventh century. Far from declining
from the age of Isidore, the Church was building on his legacy and,
as in the case of VIII Toledo, groping towards fuller definition and
resolution of problems on which he had touched. From both sides the
relationship between the Church and the monarchy was changing,