l use was made of it. The local law was founded on usage and on
the papal letters called decretals. The latter were of two kinds: some
were addressed to the bishops of the ecclesiastical province immediately
subject to the pope; the others were issued in answer to questions
submitted from various quarters; but in both cases the doctrine is the
same. At the beginning of the 6th century the Roman Church adopted the
double collection, though of private origin, which was drawn up at that
time by the monk Dionysius, known by the name of Dionysius Exiguus,
which he himself had assumed as a sign of humility. He was a Scythian by
birth, and did not come to Rome till after 496, his learning was
considerable for his times, and to him we owe the employment of the
Christian era and a new way of reckoning Easter. At the desire of
Stephen, bishop of Salona, he undertook the task of making a new
translation, from the original Greek text, of the canons of the Greek
collection. The manuscript which he used contained only the first fifty
of the Apostolic Canons; these he translated, and they thus became part
of the law of the West. This part of the work of Dionysius was not added
to later; it was otherwise with the second part. This embodied the
documents containing the local law, namely 39 decretals of the popes
from Siricius (384-398) to Anastasius II. (496-498). As was natural this
collection received successive additions as further decretals appeared.
The collection formed by combining these two parts remained the only
official code of the Roman Church until the labours undertaken in
consequence of the reforming movement in the 11th century. In 774 Pope
Adrian I. gave the twofold collection of the Scythian monk to the future
emperor Charlemagne as the canonical book of the Roman Church; this is
what is called the _Dionysio-Hadriana_. This was an important stage in
the history of the centralization of canon law; the collection was
officially received by the Frankish Church, imposed by the council of
Aix-la-Chapelle of 802, and from that time on was recognized and quoted
as the _liber canonum_. If we consider that the Church of Africa, which
had already suffered considerably from the Vandal invasion, was at this
period almost entirely destroyed by the Arabs, while the fate of Spain
was but little better, it is easy to see why the collection of Dionysius
became the code of almost the whole of the Western Church, with the
exception of the