152 Lafferty
substantive or procedural rules developed by and native to another legal
system. In its broadest form, reception may involve the wholesale adoption
of an entire alien legal system or it may involve narrower borrowings. The
Ostrogoths certainly possessed their own rudimentary laws and customs prior
to their arrival on Roman soil. Concerning this tradition, Jordanes says that
Dicineus, the great and mythical civilizer of the savage Goths, gave them laws
by which they learned to live, and which still existed in writing in his day and
were referred to as belagines.13 But it is unlikely that the Goths brought with
them a coherent body of Germanic law. First, they were not a long-established
political or ethnic group, but rather a happenstance collection of military units
and sundry hangers-on who had migrated to and through the empire for gen-
erations before they were settled. Second, Theoderic was acutely aware that he
had everything to gain by maintaining rather than upsetting the existing status
quo. His followers comprised only a fraction of the overall population of Italy,
the vast majority of which was Roman or at least thoroughly Romanized in
terms of culture, economy, institutions, and law.14 To that end, he was eager to
preserve as much of the material and cultural heritage of the Roman world as
possible. For its part, the surviving Roman population was anxious to maintain
as much as they could of the infrastructure associated with the highly urban-
ized culture of ancient Rome. In the aftermath of conquest, accommodation
to the changed realities became a priority of both Romans and Goths within
the newly established Ostrogothic regime. And Roman law would serve as the
basis for this accommodation.
Vulgar Law
As the Edictum Theoderici illustrates, however, the Roman law of Theoderic’s
kingdom was not the law of Augustan Rome or even Justinian’s eastern Roman
Empire. Precisely what it was is a question intimately connected with the
much larger issue of Vulgarrecht. The expression ‘vulgar law’ was first coined
by the legal historian Heinrich Brunner in 1880 to designate a body of relatively
13 Jordanes, Getica 11.69, ed. Mommsen: “... naturaliter propriis legibus vivere fecit, quas
usque nunc conscriptas belagines nuncupant... ” On the legal tradition of the belagines,
see Christensen, Cassiodorus, Jordanes and the History of the Goths, p. 246.
14 Theoderic’s followers comprised some 20,000 troops and their families, a number total-
ling around 40,000. See further Burns, “Calculating Ostrogothic Population”, pp. 457–64;
Wolfram (History of the Goths, p. 279), estimates about 100,000; and similarly, Ensslin,
Theoderich der Grosse, pp. 62–4.