28 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINan aping of imperial practice, in the interest of emphasising some of
the Roman roots of their authority.37 A more concrete notion is that
the king's intentions were purely practical, in providing a written
statement of Gothic custom and perhaps some new law based on it
for use in cases involving both Roman and Gothic participants, where
their two systems of law might thereby come into conflict. This idea
could be strengthened by reference to the Law of Gundobad, contem-
porary with Euric's Code, where such a purpose does seem to be at
least one of the specific aims of the royal legislator.^38
There is, however, another school of thought that takes a com-
pletely different starting point. This is the view that the essence of
Euric's Code and other similar law books lies not in Germanic custom,
but in late Roman vulgar law.^39 By this is meant a kind of common
law that regulated the mundane workings of society, and was quite
different in character and subject-matter from the statute law of the
imperial edicts and rescripts. Land law, sales and exchanges, inherit-
ances and so forth were the stuff of this legal area, as they were of
the Codes of Euric and Gundobad. Unfortunately, in the present state
of knowledge the Roman vulgar law is almost as mysterious and in-
tangible as original Germanic custom. But there are a number of
remarkable parallels between some of the enactments of the seventh-
century Byzantine code, the Farmers' Law, and some of those of the
Codes of various Germanic peoples, principally of the Visigoths, the
Burgundians, and the Lombards.^40 Parallels with the Visigothic Code
of Reccesuinth are in all cases with laws in that book that are marked
antiqua, that is to say, come from the lost Code of Leovigild. In all
cases these individual laws can be shown to be Eurician in origin, or
to be from that earlier Code but slightly altered by Leovigild. Now as
no one is going to argue that the Byzantines borrowed their law from
the Germanic kingdoms, a common grounding of the legislation of
both in the vulgar law of Rome is surely the most sensible explana-
tion. This also makes more sense of the striking similarity between a
number of common features of the various codes of the different
Germanic peoples. Thus the search for the legal origins of the con-
tents of Euric's Code and those of his fellow kings is probably better
directed towards the area of late Roman vulgar law than towards the
nebulous realm of Germanic custom.
There still remains the question for whom the law was intended. If
the basis of this law is Roman, there is less likelihood that the pur-
pose of the Code was to give the Goths a law book of their own. This