While the continual struggle between Church and Empire, communes and feudal lords, Guelphs and Ghibellines, was being waged, the statutes were framed. In these were recorded, not only new customs written down as they were formed, but also all the old customs that had been modified by the new. Although the jurists of Bologna thought it no concern of theirs to study a system of law, which being in common use was then well known, and which had its source in that Roman jurisprudence which engaged their attention through their whole lives, for us it is certainly a study of grave importance, as a means of accurately estimating the value and character of this communal life in the Middle Ages. We may have very long to wait before we can completely solve the problem. Nevertheless we may make a beginning by examining the various statutes, comparing them with one another, and also comparing the different forms which each of them received at different stages of drafting, in order to discern the evolution of the new law, to ascertain and understand the principle which governs it. X. The whole life of the Commune is embraced in the statutes: the election and functions of political magistrates; public, civil, criminal, administrative, and commercial law. Public law is the subject most fully dealt with; while, for reasons already explained, civil law is left very incomplete. Nevertheless the statutes handle, with more or less detail, such matters as personal _status_, dowers, contracts, judicial procedure, succession, wills, rights arising in respect of contiguous lands or houses, and, above all, the family. They aim at a simple and summary procedure, free from chicanery, whereby causes may be settled fairly and promptly; but from defective drafting, from admitting a running commentary, altogether out of place in legal enactments, and from leaving too much to the discretion of the judge, they generally lead to a contrary result. It is indeed astonishing to observe how, during those centuries in which a splendid literature was growing up, when the most unpretentious writings offer us an example of good style, and when judges, notaries, and professors of law had the imperishable model of the _Corpus iuris_ constantly before their eyes, the statutes should have been written in a form so illiterate that we may often pronounce it barbarous, and always involved and confused. The statutes constitute a legislation based upon custom, mutable, popular, still uncertain of itself, which, taking its birth in the midst of civil wars, always retained their likeness, and never arrived at classical elegances, which in any case would have been made impossible by the scholastic jargon that still prevailed in our Universities and among our jurists. Petrarch's animadversions, directed chiefly against the obscure phraseology of the professors of law in his time, were fully justified. The classical revival which sought to introduce a