Woodcut of a court scene from Praxis criminis persequendi, Jean Milles de Souvigny, 1541. As a result of writs were not adequate to cover all situations, courts of equity have been in the end established to hear complaints and devise applicable remedies based mostly on equitable ideas taken from many sources of authority (similar to Roman law and natural” regulation).
Among them have been the Anglo-Saxons of England, the Franks of western Germany and northern France, the Burgundians, the Visigoths of southern France and Spain, and the Lombards of Italy Though the traditions of Roman law endured for a while, Germanic customs came to prevail in most regions.
That pleasure, perhaps blended with envy inspired by the up to date European motion towards codification, resulted in the first systematic, analytic treatise on English frequent legislation: William Blackstone’s (1723-1780) Commentaries on the Laws of England.
Its origins and model are to be found within the monumental compilation of Roman legislation commissioned by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century CE. Whereas this compilation was lost to the West within many years of its creation, it was rediscovered and made the basis for legal instruction in eleventh-century Italy and in the sixteenth century came to be often called Corpus iuris civilis.
Within the eighteenth century, the reforming aspirations of Enlightenment rulers aligned with jurists’ desire to rationalize the law to provide complete, systematic authorized codes including Austria’s 1786 Code of Joseph II and Full Civil Code of 1811, Prussia’s Full Territorial Code of 1794, and France’s Civil Code (often known as the Napoleonic Code) of 1804.