Liber Constitutionum

Colloquially called the Code of Gundobad, in all the 13 surviving manuscripts the Burgundian law code is titled the Liber Constitutionum. Of these surviving MSS, the earliest can be dated to the ninth century and two primary traditions exist: the first tradition contains a prologue that ascribes the codification to Gundobad, while the other ascribes it to his son Sigismund. The confusion caused by these contradictory prologues has traditionally been solved by ascribing the first 41 titles to Gundobad, while titles 42 - 88 are ascribed to Sigismund. A more recent interpretation, that has now been broadly accepted, is that that majority of the laws were issued by Gundobad, but that they were officially collated and codified by Sigismund. Of the MSS which survive, eight contain a standard 88 titles, while five contain 105 titles. The additional 17 titles are generally accepted to be later additions to the original text.

Whether the Lib. Con. can be seen as an explicitly royal text, in the manner of the Lombard or Visigothic texts, or as an attempt at presenting its laws as being traditional has been debated, although in recent years it has more commonly been viewed as an openly royal work. The co-existence of the Lib. Con. alongside the Lex Romana Burgundionum (LRB) and the ethnic terminologies used by both codifications has been commonly used as evidence of binary divisions between Romans and Barbarians in Burgundy and for ‘personality of law’, whereby the Lib. Con. regulated ethnic Burgundians and the LRB served for ethnic Romans. This traditional interpretation of their co-existence has not gone unchallenged, with scholars such as Patrick Amory suggesting that the two codes were designed to work together, not in opposition. Amory himself has posited the theory that the Lib. Con. existed for rural use, while the LRB was for the city.

In this interpretation both the LRB and the Lib. Con. are considered territorial supplements to classical Roman law, each for specific circumstances, not personalised replacements and it is this interpretation that has prevailed in more recent scholarship. That the compilation of the Lib. Con. had some Roman influence is supported by Sidonius Apollinaris who writes that his friend Syagrius has become a ‘Solon to the Burgundians,’ a statement that has been taken to mean that Syagrius acted in an advisory capacity for Gundobad as he was formulating his laws.