The Burgundian Code: Book of Constitutions or Law of Gundobad; Additional Enactments

130 Pages·1996·1.42 MB·English

by  Katherine Fischer Drew (transl.)

THE BURGUNDIAN CODE
University of Pennsylvania Press
MIDDLE AGES SERIES
Edited by Edu;ard Peters
Henry Charles Lea Professor
of Medieval History
University of Pennsylvania
A listing of the available books in this series
appears at the back of this volume
The Burgundian Code
BOOK OF CONSTITUTIONS
OR LAW OF GUNDOBAD
ADDITIONAL ENACTMENTS
Translated by
KATHERINE FISCHER DREW
Foreword by
EDWARD PETERS
Copyright O 1949, 1976 by the University of Pennsylvania Press
Foreword copyright O 1972 by
the University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-182499
All rights reserved
5th paperback printing 1996
ISBN 0-8122-1035-2
Printed in the United States of America
FOREWORD TO THE
PENNSYLVANIA PAPERBACK EDITION
Edward Peters
THE great frontier which divided the inhabitants of the Roman
Empire from the Celtic and Germanic peoples who lived beyond
their northern provinces consisted not only of forts, frontier settle-
ments, and defense works, but of cultural and institutional differ-
ences as well. To the Romans, these people were barbari, bar-
barians who did not know the life of the city nor the gifts of
literacy. Although Germans often settled within the imperial
frontiers, joined the Roman army--eventually coming to com-
mand it-and even served the diplomatic interests of the Empire
outside its borders by waging war with tribes who were still its
enemies, the persistent Roman attitude toward the barbarians
remained a powerful force until the disappearance of the Roman
Empire in the West in the fifth and sixth centuries. Yet from the
second century, that frontier was subtly transformed. Germanic
military tactics altered the traditional Roman military structure;
Germanic costume appeared frequently in Roman fashion; ulti-
mately entire Germanic peoples were absorbed by the Empire,
either through diplomatic negotiation or by invasion from outside.
The proximity of Roman institutions, of course, altered the
structure of Germanic society even more rapidly than the Germans
influenced the Romans. Roman forms of military command and
provincial administration, Roman agricultural and social institu-
tions, and the Latin language itself produced irreversible changes
among those barbarians who eventually inherited the western part
of the Roman Empire and became the first Europeans.
In no area is the transformation of the frontier between Ger-
man and Roman more apparent than in the appearance of the
law codes of the Germanic peoples from the early fifth century
vi FORE WORD
on. The very act of writing down Germanic customary law was a
triumph of Roman influence, and its consequences continue to
influence the legal structures of much of the world down to the
present day. Professor Drew's translation of the Liber Constitu-
tionum sive lex Gundobada and the Constitutiones Extravagantes
constitutes The Burgundian Code, a Gennanic lawbook compiled
by the Burgundian kings Gundobad and Sigismund in the last
quarter of the fifth century and the first quarter of the sixth. This
translation gives the reader of history a portrayal of the social
institutions of a Gennanic people far richer and more exhaustive
than any other available source. This work is important not only
for historians of legal institutions, but for social historians and
anthropologists as well. In the last few years there has been
renewed interest in these early Germanic law codes as evidence
for a broad range of problems in the history of human society.
Professor Drew's translation and introduction of The Burgundian
Code should contribute to that interest and broaden the appeal of
these law codes to a wider range of social and cultural investiga-
tions than they have traditionally been associated with.
Since the original publication of this work in 1949, a number of
other works have appeared in English which enhance the irnpor-
tance of Professor Drew's work and constitute a useful body of
literature for further research. The work of anthropologists and
the points at which their own research into the social structure of
primitive societies touches early medieval law has recently been
summarized by Max Gluckmann in his Politics, Law, and Ritual
in Tribal Society (New York, paper, 1968). Professor Drew her-
self has studied the role of the barbarian kings in the shaping of
these law codes in a number of studies, most comprehensively in
"Barbarian Kings as Lawgivers and Judges," an article in Robert
S. Hoyt, ed., Life and Thought in the Early Middle Ages (Min-
neapolis, 1967), pp. 7-29. The collected papers of Floyd Seward
Lear, published as Treason in Roman and Germanic Law (Austin,
Tex., 1965), deal with a wider range of topics than the title indi-
cates and are indispensible for further study in this field. Paul
Vinogradoff, Roman Law in Medieval Europe (3rd ed., Oxford,
1961) offers the best short study of the relationship between
Roman and Gennanic laws now available in English.
FOREWORD vii
The reprinting of Professor Drew's translation of The Burgun-
dian Code ought therefore to appeal to a much wider range of
readers than simply those concerned with legal history. Those
social institutions reflected in the law codes of the Germanic
peoples illuminate not only the differences between Roman and
barbarian, but those between underdeveloped and developed
societies, and between the stages in the history of a society itself
in which transformations of the utmost importance can only be
traced, not in written histories or memoirs, but through the new
forms of expression which the transformation takes. A society's
conception of precisely what law is-and, by implication, what it is
not-is a much-neglected but valuable indicator of the character
of that society itself. Professor Drew has enabled the English-
speaking reader to discover some of these aspects of Burgundian
society at a crucial period in its history.
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