However that may be, it is undeniable that the family, as we now find it constituted, or, more correctly speaking, weakened, by the Justinian law has not the qualities which would enable it, in the ages of barbarism now at hand, to withstand the violent onset of the advancing Germanic peoples, much less to be the nucleus and germ from which the new society of the Italian Commune may take birth. In fact, in the statutes we find the family constituted on a very different footing. Agnation has recovered its ascendancy. The woman is under a new species of guardianship; and although the dotal system is rigorously observed, there are innumerable regulations designed to keep family property together, or make it revert to the family, so as to preserve the domestic patrimony intact. Here an important question arises, namely, whether this new constitution of the family, which stands in close relation with the public law of the communes, is a return to the pre-Justinian law, or derived from Germanic institutions and the Longobard law, in which we find, in fact, precedence accorded to agnate kin and a more stable family organisation? Italian writers, the earlier writers more especially, adhered for the most part to the former theory, while the majority of German authors, who have recently found disciples even among ourselves, adopt the second view. Thus, on either side we find theories propounded as to the constitution of the Italian family in the Middle Ages, analogous to those concerning the origin of the communes.[371]