5. JENKS: EDWARD I 161 schools of Bologna, Pisa, and Padua, to the Courts of Europe. At first the Church had no word of blame for the new movement ; for the Byzantine Empire, though schismatic according to later Western ideas, was a Christian Empire, and Justinian's Code accorded due honour to Bishop and Church. And, even after the Church, pursuing her new policy of isolation, had forbidden her priests to study the " secular " or " imperial " laws, and had set up a formidable rival in the Canon Law, the enthusiasm of the students of the Roman Law abated not a whit. In fact, the sincere flattery of imitation was accorded to Justinian's work by the Papal legislators, who compiled their Corpus Juris Canonici on thaV very model which the Corpus Juris Civilis had seemed to ren- der inevitable. And, in drawing a sharp line between the professors of the Civil and the Canon Laws, the Papacy made one of its most fatal mistakes, by alienating from its service a body of men who, for the first time in the history of Western Christendom, made a serious inroad upon the intellectual monopoly of the Church. As a very natural result, the nations of Western Europe, or rather their rulers, began, at the end of the Middle Ages, to look upon the Corpus Juris of Justinian, not merely as a monument of Roman greatness, but as a complete code of conduct for the guidance of secular affairs. Realising fully, that the barbarous local customs of their own peoples, and even the general maxims of feudalism, offered no satisfactory guides for the new world of commerce which was growing up around them, they turned more and more for the solution of new and complicated problems to the ever ready pages of the Digest and the Code. In some cases, as in Spain, the Roman Law spoke of a past which men were proud to con- trast with the present. There, the compilation of the Siete Partidas, modelled on the seven years of the legal curriculum in the Roman Law schools, was the Christian's badge of defiance to the hated but impressive Saracen. In others, as in Southern France, the continuity between the city life of the Roman provinces, and the city life of Gascony and Aquitaine, was at least a cherished tradition; and it was nal-rn.1 that Southern France should be a pays du droit ecrit.
