124 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINThe codifications of Leovigild, Reccesuinth and Ervig represented
important stages in the functioning of a working legal system that
sought to affect and enhance the operations of justice by means of
royal law-making. The very title of the code of Reccesuinth, attested
to in the earliest manuscript, calling itself 'The Book of the Judges',
seems to indicate that, as in the case of earlier Roman equivalents,
the intention was to provide the administrators of the law with a
systematic statement of it. Such an aim was paralleled in the royal
edicts of the Lombard kingdom, but alien to Frankish and Anglo-
Saxon conceptions.
However, even in the heyday of the Roman Empire, the workings
of the legal system were never as coherent and uncomplicated as
some critics of the subsequent Germanic law codes seem to imply.
Contradictions existed in the laws and little effort was made to bring
new legislation to the knowledge of those required to administer it.
The first official codification of Roman law was not undertaken until
·438. Nor can we be certain that the promulgation of this the
Theodosian Code or of its successor, that of Justinian, implied that
thereafter a copy might be found in the hands of every judge in the
Empire. So, too, in Visigothic Spain, it is not necessary to assume that
the existence of codifications was essential to the working of the legal
system, although their value in practice was considerable.
In fact, there are strong indications that the codes of Reccesuinth
and Ervig were as much the products of political necessity as of dis-
interested concern for legal reform. Strikingly, both were directly
preceded by trenchant criticism of royal government in church coun-
cils. This is only elsewhere found in the disparagement of Sisebut's
attempt at enforced conversion of the Jews by the bishops at N Toledo.
VIII Toledo of 653, held the year before the first issue of Liber
/udiciorum, took the remarkable step, unique in the Visigothic period,
of systematically defining its conception of the qualities required of
kings. This went far beyond the limited statements of Isidore in his
Etymologiae and Sententiae, although clearly deriving from his defini-
tions. The bishops at VIII Toledo held that kings should be the pro-
tectors of the Catholic faith, its defenders against the 'perfidy' of the
Jews and the injuries that might be inflicted by heresy. Kings should
be moderate in their making of laws and giving of judgements, and
modest in their own lives. They were warned against using force to
extort property from their subjects or making fraudulent claims about
agreements. Most remarkably the distinction between property held