The great Corpus Juris of Justinian had been given to the world before the earliest of the British or English codes; and long before Justinian's day there prevailed, throughout the Roman Empire, an admirably ordered system of jurisprudence. This system must have prevailed in Britain during the period of Roman occupation; and it could not possibly have failed to influence for all time the minds of the people by familiarising them with certain legal conceptions. Furthermore ecclesiastical influences were powerful. The Church had its Canon Law, the peculiar Law of a society far more civilized than the world {47} around it; and consciously or unconsciously the princes who designed the secular codes must have learned much from it. Doubt has been thrown upon the truth of the tradition which tells of the making of the laws of Howel Dda; but here historical scepticism seems to have overrun its legitimate limits. As we have already seen, codification was the fashion of the times; and there is no inherent improbability in Howel's having done precisely what all his royal contemporaries were doing. A century ago Welsh historians were credulous almost to the point of imbecility. They belonged to the pre-critical days of historical writing, above which only a towering genius like Gibbon could rise. Then arose the great reaction, and it became the fashion to doubt almost everything, and especially anything that was picturesque and intimate in the records of the past. Even the existence of such undoubtedly historical characters as Saint David and King Arthur was disbelieved by these over-zealous critics. At last, however, the pendulum, after swinging so violently from one side to the other, is beginning to right itself; and the result is that we are coming to accept as true, or at least as possibly true, much that had been {48} rejected and derided by the last generation of scholars.