142 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINTwo of the laws belong to Chindasuinth, two to EIVig and one to
Egica.^96 This last, issued in 702, puts increased onus on local com-
munities to check the identity and legal status of dubious outsiders.
This should not be seen as indicating that the royal administration
was no longer able to guarantee owners secure possession of their
slaves. No Early Medieval government, not even that of Rome, could
do that. The problem in Spain was made even more difficult by the
nature of the terrain, and the threat posed to public order by ban-
ditry on the part of such fugitives was all the harder to combat. What
Egica did was to provide means of redress in disputes over ownership
and legal status when possible escapees were found, and, more strik-
ingly, to place responsibility on local citizens to co-operate in detect-
ing fugitives. This was a far from impractical measure, and similar in
character to subsequent developments in medieval judicial practice,
that placed responsibility for local good order on the community.
Christian slaves were not outsiders in the society developing in late
Visigothic Spain in the way that the Jews were, though the final state
of the two was equated by Egica's act of enslaving the Jewish commun-
ity. Even without legal status or privilege both groups still needed to
be regulated and watched. So too did foreign merchants, grave rob-
bers, bee thieves and many other categories of suspicious or iniqui-
tous persons: Visigothic Spain was not a comfortable place in which
to live, particularly in its final half-century of existence. But it is
important not to let its subsequent fate, as the result of unexpected
invasion, cast an apocalyptic glow over those decades. The incapaci-
tating of the state in 711, as a result of the death of the king and the
fall of the capital, is, if anything, evidence of how successful the
Visigothic kings and their episcopal advisers had been in their cen-
tralising of authority. It was not moral crisis or demoralisation that
made the kingdom so vulnerable. Paradoxically it was rather the
achievement of that very aim of central control of political authority,
that its rulers had so long sought to bring about. Nor should it be
forgotten just how much suIVived, or how much later centuries in
Spain were to owe to this period, and particularly to the achieve-
ments of its Church and its law-makers.
In conclusion it is striking, although it has hitherto gone un-
remarked, that the last three m:lJor legislative acts of the Visigothic
kings prefigured similar but subsequent developments in Medieval
Europe. The first of these was the enslavement of the Jews by Egica,
the possible fiscal motivation for which has just been discussed. Jews