The most important by far, owing to the political destinies in which it was involved, was the Norman law, which was borrowed from the Frankish. After the Conquest of England in 1066, this drove out the native Saxon, and since that day in England “the law of the great men has become the law of the whole people.” Its purely German spirit has developed it, without a catastrophe, from a feudal régime of unparalleled stringency into the institutions of the present day which have become law in Canada, India, Australia, South Africa, and the United States. Even apart from the extent of its power, it is the most instructive in West Europe. Its development, unlike that of the rest, did _not_ lie in the hands of theoretical jurists. The study of Roman law at Oxford was not allowed to touch practice; and at Merton in 1236 the higher nobility expressly rejected it. The Bench itself continued to develop the old law-material by means of creative precedents, and it was these practical decisions (“Reports”) that formed the basis of law-books such as that of Bracton.[113] Since then, and to this day, a statute law, kept living and progressive by the court decisions, and a common law, which always vividly underlies the legislation, exist side by side, without its ever becoming necessary for the representatives of the people to make single large efforts at codification. In the South, the law of the German-Roman codices above mentioned prevailed--in southern France the Visigothic (called the _droit écrit_ in contrast to the Frankish _droit coutumier_ of the north), and in Italy the Lombard (which was the most important of them, was almost purely Germanic, and held its own till well into the Renaissance). Pavia became a study-centre for German law and produced about 1070 the “_Expositio_,” by far the greatest achievement of juridical science in the age, and immediately after it a code, the “_Lombarda_.”[114] The legal evolution of the entire South was broken off by Napoleon’s _Code Civil_, which took its place. But this in turn has become in all Latin lands and far beyond them the basis for further creative work--and hence, after the English, it is the most important.