ules and custom known as the Law Merchant, which
claimed acceptance in the name neither of Justinian nor of the Church,
but of universal reason. It was amply proved afterwards that the
foundations of the Roman system were strong enough to carry the fabric
of modern legislation. But the collapse of the Roman power in western
Christendom threw society back into chaos, and reduced men's ideas of
ordered justice and law to a condition compared with which the earliest
Roman law known to us is modern.

In this condition of legal ideas, which it would be absurd to call
jurisprudence, the general duty of keeping faith is not recognized
except as a matter of religious or social observance. Those who desire
to be assured of anything that lies in promise must exact an oath, or a
pledge, or personal sureties; and even then the court of their
people--in England the Hundred Court in the first instance--will do
nothing for them in the first case, and not much in the two latter.
Probably the settlement of a blood-feud, with provisions for the payment
of the fine by instalments, was the nearest approach to a continuing
contract, as we now understand the term, which the experience of
Germanic antiquity could furnish. It is also probable that the
performance of such undertakings, as it concerned the general peace, was
at an early time regarded as material to the commonweal; and that these
covenants of peace, rather than the rudimentary selling and bartering of
their day, first caused our Germanic ancestors to realize the importance
of putting some promises at any rate under public sanction. We have not
now to attempt any reconstruction of archaic judgment and justice, or
the lack of either, at any period of the darkness and twilight which
precede the history of the middle ages. But the history of the law, and
even the present form of much law still common to almost all the
English-speaking world, can be understood only when we bear in mind that
our forefathers did not start from any general conception of the state's
duty to enforce private agreements, but, on the contrary, the state's
powers and functions in this regard were extended gradually,
unsystematically, and by shifts and devices of ingenious suitors and
counsel, aided by judges, rather than by any direct provisions of
princes and rulers. Money debts, it is true, were recoverable from an
early time. But this was not because the debtor had promised to repay
the loan; it was because