would, force their laws upon the conquered inhabitants.  Among these the old civilization lingered on in a degenerate form, and with it the Roman law.  One of the first things that happened was that the conquerors drew up for their Roman subjects short codes of the Roman law as it survived in a debased form, as they drew up statements of their own law for their followers.  For a long time each man, according to the community to which he belonged, had a ‘personal’ law.  As late as A.D. 850 we hear that in France it might happen that five men met together and each would have a different law.  Of course such a state of things means before very long that there must be at any rate one set of common legal rules which must be applied throughout a territory, namely rules to decide which kind of personal law is to be used when there is a dispute between two persons whose personal law is different.

Gradually the different populations within the same area coalesce, and law from being personal becomes local.  But the local area will not be the same for all purposes.  The law or custom which determines the rights of the small, often unfree or half-free tenant, whether as between him and his neighbour or as between him and his lord, may extend no further than a very small area, such as in England we call a manor.  The law by which great men held their land from a king, though perhaps not uniform throughout the kingdom, will cover a much larger area.  The fact that a great man may hold land in far distant places, it may be in different kingdoms, and that men of this class have connexions with different parts of Western Europe will lead to the formation of common notions of feudal law, which make possible even the scientific study of a law of feuds, though no complete uniformity was ever attained.

England was the first western country to attain political unity with a territory substantially the same as at the present day; and the determination of the English kings that in the more important matters justice should be done throughout the land in the king’s name, either by his courts at Westminster or by judges sent by him to the counties, secured the formation of an English Common Law which left comparatively little play for local custom, and which at an early time became strong enough to resist attempts to introduce foreign law.  As early as the time of Henry III the barons proclaimed with one voice that they would not have the laws of England altered in favour of a rule—­the legitimation of bastards by the subsequent marriage of their parents—­which in one form or another has been adopted in Western Christendom, and even in the neighbouring kingdom of Scotland.

In France political unity was reached only later and bit by bit, and when it came the difference of law in the various provinces was too firmly established to make uniformity possible until the time of the Revolution.  In Germany the shadowy unity of the Holy Roman Empire was never enough to afford any effective central administration of justice.  National law in the strict sense was impossible under such conditions:  the most that can be expected is such a degree of unity as results from common traditions inherited from more primitive times, and a community of language and national feeling.