Towards the end of the Middle Ages the Roman law became the principal and almost the sole study of the German legists; indeed, at this time, most of them pursued their education out of Germany in the Italian universities. These legists, though not the masters of political society, were charged with the explanation and application of its laws; and though they could not abolish the Germanic law, they altered and disfigured it so as to fit into the frame of the Roman law. They applied the Roman law to everything in the German institutions that seemed to have the most remote analogy with the legislation of Justinian; and they thus introduced a new spirit and new usage into the national legislation; by degrees it was so completely transformed that it was no longer recognisable, and in the seventeenth century, for instance, it was almost unknown. It had been replaced by a nondescript something, which was German indeed in name, but Roman in fact. I find reason to believe that owing to these efforts of the legists, the condition of ancient Germanic society deteriorated in many respects, especially so far as the peasants were concerned; many of those who had succeeded until then in preserving the whole or part of their liberties or of their possessions, lost them at this period by learned assimilations of their condition to that of the Roman bondsmen or emphyteotes. This gradual transformation of the national law, and the vain efforts which were made to oppose it, may be clearly traced in the history of Würtemberg. From the origin of the county of that name in 1250, until the creation of the duchy in 1495, the legislation was purely indigenous; it was composed of customs and local laws made by the towns or by the Courts of Seignory, and of statutes promulgated by the Estates; ecclesiastical affairs alone were regulated by a foreign code, the canon law.