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

Translated by Katherine Fisher Drew. Foreword by Edward Peters.

5th paperback printing 1996.

The great frontier which divided the inhabitants of the Roman Empire from the Celtic and Germanic peoples who lived to the north was one of culture and institutions as well as forts and defense works. Yet from the bloody clashes of the third and fourth centuries there emerged a society that was neither Germanic nor Roman, but a compound of both. The Burgundian Code, or Law of Gundobad, is one of the earliest expressions of that new society.

When the East German tribe of the Burgundians settled in the Rhone Valley, they found there a people who had long been subject to Imperial statutory law, a law alien to their own customary codes. The Burgundian Code embodies many compromises; it represents a determined effort to balance rights of Roman and Burgundian alike. Written in Latin, it yet reflects the morality of a Germanic people. Ably transated by Katherine Fischer Drew, the Burgundian Code offers historians and anthropologists alike illuminating insights into a crucial period of contact between a developed and a tribal society.