Before the advent of systematized law, there was no class of lawyers, professional legal literature or official judiciary. Law consisted of primitive rules embedded in society, religion and folk customs. Not even the Romans, famous for their legal codes, had developed a formal system of law and concepts.
It was only in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries that Christian civilization consciously systematized law and its institutions. This advance improved the practice of justice and insured the rights of men. According to legal historian Harold Berman, it was only medieval society that developed for the first time in history an “independent, integrated, developing body of legal principles and procedures clearly differentiated from other processes of social organization and
consciously articulated by a corps of persons specifically trained for that task” (Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1983, p. 50).