The Legacy of Roman Law in Post-Roman Britain

Abstract A logical approach to a study of the transmission and influence of Roman law in post-Roman Britain would be to look both at late Roman legislation associated with Britain and at legal systems operating within the former Roman diocese during the early Middle Ages, and then to try to squeeze these two endpoints together to meet in the historical context of Late Antiquity. Unfortunately, this method would fail at both ends. The Romano-British imprint on late Roman law codes is astonishingly slight, and provides no safe basis for anything beyond speculation. The legal systems of early medieval Britain, and in particular the Welsh and Anglo-Saxon laws, show no evidence of significant, direct influence of Roman law traceable to the Roman governance of Britain. The exceptional lack of impact of Roman law on Roman and post-Roman Britian surely deserves discussion and explanation.