THE SEVENTH-CENTURY KINGDOM 123existed under the jurisdiction of two independent systems of law then
the effect of this regulation was to abolish the Romans' law. The Liber
Iudiciorum thereby appears as the first territorial law code, that is, the
first code to apply its rules equally to all inhabitants of a region
irrespective of racial or cultural differences.
However, it has already been suggested that the Codes of Euric and
of Leovigild were enforced upon Romans and Goths alike. Some of
their regulations were preserved in the Liber Iudiciornm. Thus what
was really affected was the continued standing of the Lex Romana
Visigothorum or Breviary of Alaric II. This still had a considerable fu-
ture ahead of it in the Carolingian Empire in Francia, whence many
of its extant manuscripts have come, particularly from the region of
Burgundy.59 However only one manuscript of it is known from Spain,
and it is possible that even that was written elsewhere. This manu-
script, now in Leon Cathedral, is a palimpsest made up of sections of
two seventh-century manuscripts, one of the Breviary and the other of
a Bible, put together and written over in the ninth century with a text
of Rufinus's Ecclesiastical History. Thus Alaric's Breviary was possibly
still being copied in Spain in the seventh century but had ceased to
be of interest by the ninth.^60
Its continued application in the first half of the seventh century is
also confirmed by a few citations of secular laws in the acts of some
of the church councils, notably II Seville of 619, which appear to be
references to the Breviary.61 Interestingly the individual laws in ques-
tion are described by the bishops as coming from lex mundialis or
lex publica (the universal or the public law), which would seem most
inappropriate if this law were not common to all sectors of society.
However, some of what was contained in the Breviary had already
been supplemented or amplified by the legislation of Leovigild's code.
For instance the two laws relating to rape in the former were more
than matched by the six to be found in the latter, which also paid
much greater attention to the divisions and conventions of contem-
porary Romano-Gothic society. As well as laws that had in practice
been replaced by more recent legislation, the Breviary contained rules
that had ceased to have much relevance, as for example the law
relating to 'Free-born men who were enslaved in the times of the
Tyrant', which interpreted an enactment of the emperor Constantine
I, issued in 314 and referring to his defeated rival Maxentius (306-
312).62 The impression that the Breviary needed revision and that it
was better for the Visigothic rulers to abandon it is hard to resist.