date Emperor of the Eastern remains of the great Roman state; Recared, the first Christian king of the Goths, ruled in Spain; Chilperic, who has been called the Nero of France, was his contemporary; and towards the end of that same century Pope Gregory I. was the head of the Church. =2. Social Changes.=――At this period of stress and storm, Jews were scattered in all the places where it was felt. But the legislation of the age forbade them to take the part of Roman citizens in the struggle. They were not regarded as Roman citizens either by Church council or by State code. In the eye of the law they were heretics, to be compelled or converted into Christianity, but to stand distinctly outside of it meanwhile. War was the all but universal profession. Jews might not hold military rank. They might not even be civil guardians of the peace, since ‘no Jew in any cause could be witness against a Christian.’ They might neither aspire to be owners of land, nor leaders of men. There were difficulties put in the way of their holding property, and difficulties in the way of their bequeathing it. By the time of Justinian (530‒560) the ‘must nots’ and the ‘shall nots,’ of which the Jews were the occasion, amounted to quite a considerable portion of the famous Roman code. This sort of legislation, and the warfare consequent on the break-up of the Roman Empire, together produced one very noteworthy effect. With the fall of Jerusalem the people of the Land became in a sense the people of the Book. With the fall of Rome they seem to gradually become, and for many centuries to remain, the people of the ledger. It was another and a narrower change, and one for which the Jews themselves must be held wholly free from blame. Cruel legislation turned a people with the strongest home instincts into an almost willing community of wanderers. It reduced men who, through generations, had loved to live by the work of their hands, to the necessity of living by the exercise of their wits. There was no leisure to train workers of the Bezaleel and Aholiab type into ‘skilfulness in all manner of cunning workmanship,’ for rough weapons were the chief demand of the age. There was no longer a chance for the old to sit, in peaceful sense of proprietorship, under their own vine and fig tree, whilst young tillers of the soil vigorously ‘gathered in their corn and their wine and their oil.’ The oliveyards and the vineyards and the corn-fields were often battle-fields, or sometimes pleasant adjuncts to the monasteries which were beginning to be built. In any case they were not for Jews, who might not be landowners, save in the sense that ‘six feet of English soil’ were offered in perpetuity by our English Harold to the invader.