In an age of ignorance and degeneracy a body of laws enacted and compiled by a semi-barbarous people, was necessarily largely dependent upon the maxims and precedents of such as had preceded it. The harsh, and often cruel, provisions of the Twelve Tables and the Civil Law, were greatly softened in the Visigothic Code. By the terms of the Roman _Nexum_, a debtor hypothecated himself as security for his obligation, forfeiting his liberty in case he failed to fulfil his contract; and thus, as is also declared by the Bible, “the borrower was servant to the lender;” a custom absolutely prohibited by the _Forum Judicum_. The relations of patron and client were essentially different under the Roman and Gothic dominations. At Rome, the condition of clientage could not be renounced; in Gothic Spain a freedman, or _libertus_, had the right to leave his patron and select another, provided he previously surrendered all the property he had received from his benefactor; the obsequious behavior of the Italian client often degenerated into abject servility, which was regarded with gratification by its object; while among the Visigoths nothing was exacted by the patron for his favor but the practice of obedience, and the manifestation of gratitude. The rules governing the control of public lands did not differ greatly under the civil administration of the two races; in the Peninsula, two-thirds of the conquered domain, in accordance with the usual custom of barbarians, became the property of the State by right of conquest; and the remaining third was abandoned to those who had been vanquished in the appeal to arms. The _Lex Talionis_, a prominent feature in the history of all nations in the early times of their formation, while known to have existed at Rome from the reign of Numa, and which appears with such frequency in the enactments of the Visigothic Code, was unquestionably borrowed by the authors of the latter from the institutions of Moses, in accordance with their theocratic prejudices and predilections. According to Roman ideas, a person unquestionably guilty of crime, and caught _in flagrante delicto_, was not entitled to a trial, which was considered superfluous, and his punishment could be inflicted then and there; a principle also frequently acted upon by the Visigoths.