This may suggest the manner of the apparently sudden rise of the Bologna school of Roman law, which, be it noted, took place but a little before the time of Gratian’s achievement in the Canon law, itself contemporaneous with the appearance of Peter Lombard’s novel _Books of Sentences_.[390] The preparation, although obscure, existed; and the school after its commencement passed onward through stages of development, to its best accomplishment, and then into a condition of stasis, if not decline. Irnerius apparently was its first master; and of his life little is known. He was a native of Bologna. His name as _causidicus_ is attached to a State paper of the year 1113. Thereafter he appears in the service of the German emperor Henry V. We have no sure trace of him after 1118, though there is no reason to suppose that he did not live and labour for some further years. He had taught the Arts at Ravenna and Bologna before teaching, or perhaps seriously studying, the law. But his career as a teacher of the law doubtless began before the year 1113, when he is first met with as a man of affairs. Accounts agree in ascribing to him the foundation of the school. Unless the _Summa Codicis_ already mentioned, and a book of _Quaestiones_, be really his, his glosses upon Justinian’s _Digest_, _Codex_, and _Novels_, are all we have of him;[391] of the rest we know by report. The glosses themselves indicate that this jurist had been a grammarian, and used the learning of his former profession in his exposition of the law. His interlinear glosses are explanations of words, and would seem to represent his earlier, more tentative, work when he was himself learning the meaning of the law. But the marginal glosses are short expositions of the passages to which they are attached, and perhaps belong to the time of his fuller command over the legal material. They indicate, besides, a critical consideration of the text, and even of the original connection which the passage in the _Digest_ held in the work of the jurisconsult from which it had been taken. Some of them show an understanding of the chronological sequence of the sources of the Roman law, _e.g._ that the law-making power had existed in the people and then passed to the emperors. These glosses of Irnerius represent a clear advance in jurisprudence over any previous legal comment subsequent to the _Interpretatio_ attached to the _Breviarium_. It was also part of his plan to equip his manuscripts of the _Codex_ with extracts taken from the text of the _Novels_, and not from the _Epitome of Julian_. He appears also as a lawyer versed in the practice of the law. For he wrote a book of forms for notaries and a treatise on procedure, neither of which is extant.[392]