BARBARIAN LAWS. — In the strict sense, "barbarian laws" (l. b.) refer to those laws (also called Germanic or popular laws) which the barbarian peoples, settled in various parts of Europe at the close of antiquity, codified in writing—often enriching them over time—based on ancient customs that remained valid only for members of their respective peoples.
This codification, which unfolded essentially between the late 5th and early 9th centuries, was driven by the barbarians both out of a desire to emulate the more civilized systems of the Romans or Romanized peoples with whom they had come into contact, and by the necessity of harmonizing their primitive customs with the new social, economic, and religious conditions to which they had been compelled to adapt upon settling in communal territories. It is no coincidence that all barbarian laws, with the exception of those of some peoples in the extreme north, were written in Latin—a Latin whose roughness, justified by the low state of literary culture and the difficulty of expressing concepts peculiar to the Germanic world, went hand in hand with the naivety of the entire legislative technique, in which the inability to abstract and systematize is strikingly evident.
Yet the Germanic characteristics are most clearly manifested in the substantive content of the barbarian laws: in the law of persons, where no subject of rights and obligations is conceived other than the physical individual; in family law, which is founded upon a patrimonial conception of marriage; in succession law, which ignores the will, the projection of human will beyond death; in property law, where no account is taken of *animus* but only of the material relationship between person and thing; in the law of obligations, dominated by external formalities necessary for the creation of the bond; in criminal law (the principal subject of barbarian laws, as of all primitive law), which resolves itself into a minute casuistry concerning the material assessment of harm, with no other consideration; and in procedural law, which entrusts decisions not to the science and conscience of the judge but to the so-called judgment of God (v.). More fundamental than these concrete features, however, is the Germanic juridical foundation from which the barbarian laws derive their efficacy: the *consensus populi*, which explains the name *pactus* borne by some of them, and which sharply distinguishes them from the authoritarian conception of the sources of law, carried to its extreme by the Roman law of the late Empire.
The most common classification of barbarian laws is based on ethnic groups: Frankish, Suevian, and Saxon for the Western Germans; Gothic and Scandinavian for the Eastern.
The Scandinavian laws (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic) were committed to writing late and generally do not date back beyond the 12th century. Their importance lies in their being a faithful mirror of the original Germanic customs, preserved in purer form in those remote territories.
To the Gothic group belong the laws of the three peoples (Visigoths, Burgundians, Ostrogoths) who also produced Romano-barbarian laws. Of these, the Ostrogoths had no laws that applied exclusively to them or that, in any case, departed from the usual patterns of Roman legislation; whereas the case of the Visigoths and Burgundians is quite different.
The Visigoths (in Spain and southern Gaul) had their own written laws, the first among all the barbarians, as early as the mid-5th century. Though the oldest texts are lost, fragments remain of the compilation of King Euric (467–85) in the revision made by King Leovigild (568–86), which served as a model for other barbarian legislations. The attribution to Euric of further fragments, known as the *Gaudenzi* fragments after their discoverer A. Gaudenzi, is highly contested. By the *Lex Visigothorum* is meant the extensive and complete code, more comprehensive than any other barbarian code, begun by Chindaswinth and published by Recceswinth, perhaps in 654, under the title *Liber iudiciorum*. Revised and augmented by later kings (Wamba, Ervig, Egica, Witiza), it contains, alongside a selection of *antiquae* constitutions from the compilations of Euric and Leovigild, more recent constitutions issued by Reccared I, Sisebut, Chindaswinth, and Recceswinth. With the publication of this law—of which a vernacular translation with adaptations, the *Fuero Juzgo*, a capital text of Spanish law, exists—the earlier Visigothic laws and the Roman law of the *Lex Romana Visigothorum* were both abrogated.
To the Burgundians (Burgundy), King Gundobad (474–516) gave a law originally called the *Liber constitutionum* and later commonly known, besides as the *Lex Burgundionum*, also as the *Lex Gundobada* or *Lex Gumbata* after its author. Lost in its original draft, it is known today in the form extensively revised and reworked by King Sigismund (516–24).
The Frankish group includes the *Lex Salica*, the *Lex Ribuaria*, and the *Lex (or Ewa) Chamavorum*.
The Salic law, which was to remain the fundamental text of all Frankish law, was first written, it seems, in the time of King Clovis (*Pactus legis Salicae*), and again perhaps under Charlemagne in a more complete and less corrupt form (*Lex Salica emendata*). Like the other laws, it was written in Latin and is accompanied in some manuscripts by glosses called *malbergic*, which explain the text with Frankish words. The establishment of the Holy Roman Empire under Frankish leadership increased the diffusion and authority of the Salic law even beyond France; and the Carolingian capitularies are in substance a development of Salic law, though they depart from popular laws in their juridical foundation.
The law of the Ripuarians (Middle Rhine), preserved in a late Carolingian redaction, was composed over several stages (traces of which remain in its final form) during the 6th and 7th centuries; it was strongly influenced by Salic law. The law of the Chamavi (Lower Rhine), very brief, was not written until the early 9th century by order of Charlemagne.
The Suevian group includes the *Lex Alamannorum* (Swabia and present-day Switzerland) and the *Lex (or Pactus) Baioariorum* (Bavaria). Both underwent various redactions; their definitive versions, apart from a final Carolingian revision, date to the first half of the 8th century and are due to: for the Alamanni, Duke Lantfrid (709–30), who replaced an earlier *Pactus Alamannorum* by more than a century; for the Bavarians, Duke Odilo (744–48).
Finally, the Saxon group includes the *Lex Saxonum*, the *Lex Frisionum*, the *Leges Anglo-Saxonum*, the *Lex Anglorum et Werinorum hoc est Thurlingorum* (attributed by some to the Frankish group due to affinities with Ripuarian law), and also, though with its own distinctive features, the *Edictus Langobardorum*.
The law of the Saxons, notable for the severity of its penal provisions, and the law of the Frisians, similarly distinguished by the minuteness of such provisions, both date to the 8th century, and their definitive form is due to Charlemagne. By his order, too, the law of the Angli and Werini (Thuringia) was committed to writing—it is the briefest of all. The laws of the Anglo-Saxons (England) form a distinct group, also on geographical and linguistic grounds, published from the 6th century onward by various kings.
Above all, Lombard law stands apart from the others, the only one applied extensively and for a long time on Italian soil, which maintained very particular relations with Roman and canon law and was increasingly influenced by them. When the Lombards descended into Italy as conquerors in 568, they had no written laws. Three-quarters of a century had to pass before a Lombard king, ROTARI, felt the need to put the customs (*cacarfidae*) of his barbarian people into writing, which he did by issuing on 22 November 643 an *Edictus* of 388 relatively well-ordered and complete chapters, dealing successively with crimes, family and inheritance law, real rights, obligations, and procedure. The legislative work of Rotari was continued by some of his successors, who added further chapters to the *Edictus*: 9 by Grimoald in 668, 153 by Liutprand between 713 and 735, 8 by Rachi in 746, 22 by Aistulf in 750 and 754. But what is a continuation in formal terms is an evolution in substance: over the course of a century, a law originally essentially Germanic came to incorporate ever more, especially under Liutprand, the influences of Church ethics and Roman law, accepted and made its own by the Church. These influences are manifested not only in formal reminiscences of biblical and Justinianic (or pre-Justinianic) texts, but, more importantly, in concrete institutions, such as marriage, spiritualized through the *subarhatio cum anulo*, or the testament, introduced initially to allow dispositions *pro anima*.
Completing the picture of Lombard legislation, though remaining outside the *Edictus*, are some minor provisions, partly due to the kings (among others the *Memoratorium de mercedibus magistri communicorum*, on the wages of master masons, and the *Notitia de actoribus regis* of 733, for the administrators of royal courts), and partly, after the fall of the kingdom, to the Lombard princes of Benevento, Arechis (774) and Adelchis (866).
The *unification* of Western Europe under the Holy Roman Empire (800) and the written recording of the last uncodified barbarian customs, ordered by Charlemagne (802), marked the end of the productive period of popular laws. But they did not bring about their decline in use: tied to the principle of the personality of law, they long survived the cessation of individual independent kingdoms and the changed direction of legislation, which in the Frankish capitularies reverted to being authoritarian and supranational. St AGOBARD of Lyon, deploring the harm caused by such a multiplicity of laws within a single Empire, proposed to Louis the Pious that a single law be adopted: the Frankish one. That idea of unity had a great future ahead: but it was to another law, the Roman, that the destiny of relevance in medieval Christendom would fall.
More or less complete collections of the Lombard laws are due to Sichard (1530), Herold (1557), Du Tillet (1573), Lindenborg (1613), Baluze (1677), Georgisch (1738), Canciani (1781–92), and Walter (1824). The section on *Leges* in the *Monumenta Germaniae historica* contains a critical edition, in most cases definitive, of almost all the Lombard laws; editions of lesser pretensions, such as the collections in the *Fontes iuris Germanici antiqui* and the *Germanenrechte*, are modeled on this.