It is not proposed to do more in this chapter than very briefly to examine the laws of the Burgundians and Wisigoths with reference to the evidence they contain with regard to the results of contact with Roman and Christian civilisation upon the solidarity of the kindred as shown in the payment of wergelds. The remoteness of these tribes from any connection with the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain makes it unnecessary to do more than this. Indeed, this chapter might have been omitted but for the useful light it may throw upon the process of disintegration in tribal custom in the case of tribes settling in countries with a long-established civilisation superior to their own. In such cases tribal custom, however hardly it might resist, had eventually to succumb, thus affording a strong contrast with the Cymric and Irish examples, in which tribal custom was so much better able to hold its own, and even succeeded to some extent in forcing tribal rules upon the new Christian institutions. The Burgundian laws, so far as they belong to those first issued by Gundebald himself, fall between A.D. 501 and 516, and his reference to his ancestors in his preface shows that, while he may have remodelled the laws to meet altered circumstances, they were in part based upon traditional customs of his people.[94] But his people were in a new position. Geographically they were sharing with a population still under Roman law the south-western part of the Helvetian Valley--_i.e._ between Neuchâtel and Geneva, and a good part of the old country of the Sequani on the Gallic side of the Jura. [Sidenote: The method of settlement.] They seem to have come into this district not altogether as conquerors, but in some sense as invited guests. According to Tit. 54 of the laws the newcomers, by the munificence of the Burgundian king and his ancestors, had had delegated to them individually, in a particular place, _hospitalitas_, which consisted of two thirds of the land and one third of the slaves of the _hospes_ upon whom they were quartered, and by this clause in the laws they were forbidden to take more.[95] It is generally understood that this method more or less closely resembled the Roman method of quartering soldiers upon a district. The Burgundians therefore came into a district with a mixed population of Romanised Gauls and Germans, already, after long residence and many vicissitudes, living and settled under Roman law, and regarded by the newcomers as Romans. Thus two sets of laws became necessary, one for the Burgundian immigrants, the other for the old inhabitants who were to continue under Roman law. [Sidenote: Homicide under the ‘Lex Romana.’]