Explore "The Roman and The Teuton" by Charles Kingsley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I have tried to shew you how the Teutonic nations were Christianized. I have tried to explain to you why the clergy who converted them were, nevertheless, more or less permanently antagonistic to them. I shall have, hereafter, to tell you something of one of the most famous instances of that antagonism: of the destruction of the liberties of the Lombards by that Latin clergy. But at first you ought to know something of the manners of these Lombards; and that you may learn best by studying their Code.
They are valuable to you, as giving you a fair specimen of the laws of an old Teutonic people. You may profitably compare them with the old Gothic, Franco-Salic, Burgundian, Anglo-Saxon, and Scandinavian laws, all formed on the same primaeval model, agreeing often in minute details, and betokening one primaeval origin, of awful antiquity. By studying them, moreover, you may gain some notion of that primaeval liberty and self- government, common at first to all the race, but preserved alone by England; -- to which the descendants of these very Lombards are at this very moment so manfully working their way back.