THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW ORDER 29impression is reinforced by some of the laws from the Code, such as
that relating to the inheritances of monks, that make little sense in
the context of purely Gothic society.41 Likewise, allowing the Roman
nature of some, if not all, of Euric's laws, they can hardly have been
intended principally to resolve conflicts between the Roman and
Gothic legal syatems in the courts. Thus the arguments in favour of
the Code of Euric being, like that of Reccesuinth in 654, a 'territorial'
one, that is to say, applying to all inhabitants of regions under the
authority of the Visigothic king, are strong ones.
What, then, was the purpose of this legislation? In many respects it
was intensely practical: conflicts existed in the vulgar law and Roman
statute law was contradictory. Also the problem of what was and what
was not current practice in such vital areas as inheritance, injury and
landownership was a very real one, in an age when it was hard to
know where to have recourse for authoritative law. Thus the produc-
tion of a code containing rulings on many of these vital issues was a
matter of practical value. Euric's Roman !egal advisers, who may have
included the Gallic aristocrat Leo, can hardly have viewed it other-
wise. It is conceivable too that the context of Euric's legislating is less
novel than might appear. His father Theoderic I had done something
similar, and other late fifth-and early sixth-century German kings
such as Gundobad (474-518) and Theodoric (493-526) did like-
wise.^42 By the traditional view, Euric broke new ground, and the
others imitated him, even in the case of Gundobad's borrowing laws
directly from his Code. But is is more reasonable to suppose that
precedents existed for both the form and the nature of this legisla-
tion, perhaps in the legal activities of the late Roman Praetorian
Prefects, whose functions the German kings now exercised.
This is uncontrovertibly the case with the next product ofVisigothic
royal law-making, the Roman Law of the Visigoths or Breviary of Alaric
II, issued in 506. This consisted of a considerably abbreviated version
of the Theodosian Code of 438, the principal codification of Roman
law before that of Justinian I (529, revised 533), with new 'interpre-
tations' appended to the individual laws to amend them in the light
of local or altered circumstances. To this was added an edited and
abbreviated text of the work of some of the Roman jurists. Previously
Praetorian Prefects had had the right to issue their own 'edicts', in
the form of 'interpretations' added to the statute laws of the em-
perors, to make them more relevant to the particular conditions of
the provinces for which they were responsible.^43 Thus Alaric II's