GROWTH
Once feudal law became systematized in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it developed rapidly. The specificity of its norms increased; the uniformity of its principles gradually swallowed up local differences; the reification of rights and obligations increasingly overcame the personal aspects of the lord's domination of the vassal and also gave the vassal more and more economic autonomy in managing the fief; reciprocity of rights and obligations became more and more important, as did adjudication of disputes; and the degree of integration increased.
In other words, all these characteristic features of feudal law became also tendencies of feudal law, characteristics of its autonomous growth in time.Thus feudal law shared with the new canon law of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries many of the basic qualities of legality that marked the Western legal tradition in its formative era. It was an autonomous legal system in the distinctive Western sense, characterized, on the one hand, by a conscious integration of legal values, legal institutions, and legal concepts and rules and, on the other hand, by a conscious tendency and capacity to develop in time, to grow over generations and centuries. The new feudal legal system was also characterized by a strong emphasis on the generality and objectivity of rights and obligations, on the autonomy of persons as holders of rights and obligations, on reciprocity of rights and obligations among persons of unequal social and economic status, and on wide participation of holders of rights and obligations in the proceedings in which such rights and obligations were declared. In these respects, too, feudal law resembled canon law.
Yet once this has been said, it must immediately be added that in comparison with canon law feudal law was much less systematic, much less integrated on the conscious level, much less professional, much less scientific. It was largely customary law and as such was treated more
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critically and more skeptically than the laws enacted by popes and kings, not to mention the learned law of Gratian's Decretum and glosses on Justinian's Digest.
Moreover, feudal law was secular law, the law of a world still in slow and painful process of being redeemed. It was not the spiritual law of the church. True, canon law was also subject to interpretation in the light of reason and conscience, but feudal law was much more open to correction, and even repudiation, when it was found to work injustice.Finally, canon law, in contrast to feudal law, was considered to be a complete system of law, governing every kind of legal question that might arise. Technically, of course, canon law covered only those questions that were within the ecclesiastical jurisdiction; but in fact that jurisdiction was limited only by the concept of sin, which, in turn, was defined partly in terms of the interests of the church. Thus even the rights and duties of a king toward his barons might fall within the jurisdiction of the church -- as, for example, in the case of King John of England at Runnymede in 1215. Feudal law, on the other hand, was much more narrowly conceived. It was the law of fiefs, the law of lordvassal relations. It was not only secular law, as contrasted with the spiritual law of the church, but it was only one among several competing systems of secular law.
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