Ebook: The Lombard Laws

Translated with an Introduction by Katherine Fischer Drew. Foreword by Edward Peters.

5th paperback printing 1996.

The Lombard Laws — the laws of Rothair and Grimwald, Liutprand, Ratchis, and Aistulf — are an extraordinarily important source of information about a people whose contribution to medieval civilization is just beginning to be understood.

The contributions of Rome and the Church have been well charted from surviving records. But Germanic society was a society based upon customary law and obligation, fundamentally illiterate, and our knowledge of it must be largely secondhand. A few rare exceptions, such as the law codes promulgated by the Lombard kings who ruled northern Italy from the sixth to the eighth centuries, have survived.