quished. These
customs of the conquering nation were without question the same, for the
greater part, they had observed before their migration from Germany. The
best image we have of them is to be found in Tacitus. But there is
reason to believe that some changes were made suitable to the
circumstances of their new settlement, and to the change their
constitution must have undergone by adopting a kingly government, not
indeed with unlimited sway, but certainly with greater powers than their
leaders possessed whilst they continued in Germany. However, we know
very little of what was done in these respects until their conversion to
Christianity, a revolution which made still more essential changes in
their manners and government. For immediately after the conversion of
Ethelbert, King of Kent, the missionaries, who had introduced the use of
letters, and came from Rome full of the ideas of the Roman civil
establishment, must have observed the gross defect arising from a want
of written and permanent laws. The king,[83] from their report of the
Roman method, and in imitation of it, first digested the most material
customs of this kingdom into writing, without having adopted anything
from the Roman law, and only adding some regulations for the support and
encouragement of the new religion. These laws still exist, and strongly
mark the extreme simplicity of manners and poverty of conception of the
legislators. They are written in the English of that time; and, indeed,
all the laws of the Anglo-Saxons continued in that language down to the
Norman Conquest. This was different from the method of the other
Northern nations, who made use only of the Latin language in all their
codes. And I take the difference to have arisen from this. At the time
when the Visigoths, the Lombards, the Franks, and the other Northern
nations on the continent compiled their laws, the provincial Romans were
very numerous amongst them, or, indeed, composed the body of the people.
The Latin, language was yet far from extinguished; so that, as the
greatest part of those who could write were Romans, they found it
difficult to adapt their characters to these rough Northern tongues, and
therefore chose to write in Latin, which, though not the language of the
legislator, could not be very incommodious, as they could never fail of
interpreters; and for this reason, not only their laws, but all their
ordinary transactions, were written in that language. But in En