Works & Councils of Toledo 67

What medicines are to diseases, this the laws supply to affairs. Whence it follows that sometimes the outcome is at variance with the judgment, and what conjecture believed would profit is by experience found useless. This indeed is proved also by the necessity of the present enactment, in which we mark out, by a necessary correction, the privilege lately granted by our constitution out of religious purpose to the most holy churches of God and to monasteries and to other religious places. For some time ago we had indeed commanded that the courses of the exception be extended for them to a hundred years; by the license of which enactment many affairs were indeed stirred up, and, as it were, the closed scars of ancient wounds lay open again.

But their healing could not come about, hindered as it was by the difficulties of proofs, since over so great a span of time as of the ages of evils, neither does integrity avail with documents, nor faith with records, nor age with witnesses. But because no narrowness of causes stands in the way of our bounty, treating the aforesaid privilege at once with reason and with religion, we have, by experience, drawn it back so as to reduce it to a possible measure.

And we command that, in those affairs which heretofore the exception of thirty years removed, there now be set, for the venerable churches, monasteries, and hospices for strangers (xenodochia), as well as orphanages and foundling-homes and almshouses for the poor (ptochia), a prolongation of forty years—saving indeed, with regard to other persons and causes, the force which the thirty-year prescription always claimed for itself; since this addition of ten years we grant (as has been said) to religious places alone, and to their right or contracts, so that, lulled to rest within this span of time, both personal and hypothecary actions may forever come to rest; in nothing at all derogating from the other exceptions, but holding their force and strength in others just as in the thirty-year term.

For in those affairs only (as has been said) do we will that religious contracts should enjoy the aforesaid privilege of forty years, in which our constitution had conferred upon them the prerogative of a hundred years. If indeed any causes moved by the churches and the other religious places anywhere before this our constitution have been terminated by a judicial sentence or by the agreement of a settlement, we will not that they be raked up again, but that for the rest this enactment be set against those causes which, lulled to rest before now by the silence of eight lustra (forty years), it has not befallen to be moved up to now, or, having been moved, to be terminated. Therefore let your illustrious and magnificent authority cause to come to the knowledge of all, by edicts set forth, that which our eternity has established through this general law. Given.

On the Kalends of June, at Constantinople, in the fifteenth year of the reign of our lord Justinian Augustus, in the consulship of Basilius, most illustrious.