decayed state of Roman civilization. It is probable that among
themselves the Italians kept to their old usages and legal precedents
where they were not overridden by the conquerors' law, and by degrees a
good many of the Roman civil arrangements made their way into the
Lombard code, while all ecclesiastical ones, and they were a large
class, were untouched by it.
There must have been much change of property; but appearances are
conflicting as to the terms on which land generally was held by the
old possessors or the new comers, and as to the relative legal
position of the two. Savigny held that, making allowance for the
anomalies and usurpations of conquest, the Roman population held the
bulk of the land as they had held it before, and were governed by an
uninterrupted and acknowledged exercise of Roman law in their old
municipal organization. Later inquirers, including Leo, Troya and
Hegel, have found that the supposition does not tally with a whole
series of facts, which point to a Lombard territorial law ignoring
completely any parallel Roman and personal law, to a great restriction
of full civil rights among the Romans, analogous to the condition of
the rayah under the Turks, and to a reduction of the Roman occupiers
to a class of half-free "aldii," holding immovable tenancies under
lords of superior race and privilege, and subject to the sacrifice
either of the third part of their holdings or the third part of the
produce. The Roman losses, both of property and rights, were likely to
be great at first; how far they continued permanent during the two
centuries of the Lombard kingdom, or how far the legal distinctions
between Rome and Lombard gradually passed into desuetude, is a further
question. The legislation of the Lombard kings, in form a territorial
and not a personal law, shows no signs of a disposition either to
depress or to favour the Romans, but only the purpose to maintain, in
a rough fashion, strict order and discipline impartially among all
their subjects.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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