The Social Context

This century and a half was marked by continuing crises, both religious and political. The return of the popes from Avignon to Rome sparked new convul­sions in the great schism (1378-1417) and the struggle over conciliarism, as successive councils attempted to impose limits on papal power.

conflicting, remedies for the Church’s ills, including abolition of pluralism, curbing of papal provisions, elimination of peculation and corruption, either effective implementation or abandonment of mandatory clerical celibacy, re­form of marriage law, elimination of clandestine marriages, and disciplinary re­newal in the religious orders. Many of these proposals originated with pub­licists, intellectuals, or mystics, and a few schemes received support from kings and other secular rulers.

Some reformers went beyond the bounds that Catholic orthodoxy would willingly tolerate. In England, John Wyclif (ca. 1328-1384) and his followers called for such wholesale restructuring both of traditional theology and eccle­siastical institutions that their movement was branded heretical, although Wy- clifhimself escaped direct punishment. The Bohemian reformer, John Hus (ca. 1369-1415), was not so lucky; despite guarantees of his personal safety, the Church burnt him for heresy at the Council of Constance.

This was also an age of political turmoil and endemic warfare. The Ottoman Turks seized the heartland of the ancient Byzantine Empire in Anatolia, and in 1453 they crowned their achievement by capturing Constantinople. From this base they launched attacks upon the Balkans and spurred their armies into the heartland of central Europe. By 1529, they would be at the gates of Vienna. The Hundred Years’ War (1338-1453) sapped the strength of the French monar­chy, drained England of men and money, and contributed mightily to the dis­contents that resulted in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

War and violence complicated the social dislocations that resulted from the Black Death. The great pandemic of 1348/49 was not an isolated episode, for plague outbreaks continued to recur with considerable frequency throughout the remainder of the fourteenth century—indeed, local outbreaks continued until the second half of the seventeenth century. Population levels recovered slowly following 1348/49; but not until the second half of the fifteenth century did population growth again become general on the Continent. Such sharp demographic changes resulted in a considerable measure of social realignment and stress. Labor suddenly became scarce in many regions, and the economy adapted to this new situation by concentrating investment in less labor-intensive types of enterprise. It is no coincidence that the period from the mid-fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries was an age of technological innovation. Agricul­tural workers, for example, even in areas only lightly touched by the epidemics, found their lives radically altered by changes in farming strategies adopted by landlords in quest of greater productivity using fewer workers. Skilled workers, artisans, and craftsmen saw demand for their talents soar and, at least in some areas, improved their wages and status accordingly. Governments, too, had to readjust to the new situation. As revenue sources changed, along with military and other technologies, new tax systems were sought to increase royal reve-

Social Context

nues. Social structure, economic systems, and political institutions were all afiected by the consequences of the plague epidemics.¹

The legal system felt the impact of these social changes in a variety of ways, some of them at first glance surprising. The period between 1348 and the end of the fifteenth century saw a dramatic expansion in the numbers of European universities, despite the calamities of plague, war, famine, and social turmoil.

^lSee particularly Bernard Guenee, L’Occident au XIVe et XVe siecles: Les etats, Nouvelle Clio, no. 22 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), and Jacques Heers, L’Occident au XIVe et XVe siecles: Aspects economiques et sociaux, 2d ed., Nouvelle Clio, no. 23 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966). Good general treatments of the period in English include Denys Hay, Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Cen­turies (London: Longmans; New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966); Robert L. Reynolds, Europe Emerges, Transition Toward an Industrial World-Wide Society, 600-1700 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), esp. pp. 389-434; and My­ron P. Gilmore, The World of Humanism, 2453-2527 (New York: Harper, 1952; repr. 1962). On population changes the best introductions are Russell, Late Ancient and Me­dieval Population, pp. 113-31, and David Herlihy, “Demography,” in DMA 4:136-48. For a more detailed treatment sec Roger Mols, Introduction a la demographic Itistori- que des υilles d’Europe du XIVe au XVIIle siecle, 3 vols., University of Louvain, Reeucil des travaux d’histoire et de philologie, ser.

²The French universities were: Poitiers (1431), Caen (1432), Bordeaux (1441), Nantes (1460), and Bourges (1464). In Burgundy new universities appeared at Avignon (1303), Aix (1409), Dole (1422), and Valence (1452). Italy produced universities at Pavia (1361), Ferrara (1391) and Turin (1405).

³In Eastern Europe and the Empire, universities appeared at Cracow (1364), Vienna (1365), Pecs (1367), HeideIberg (1385), Leipzig (1409), Rostock (1419), Louvain (1426), Greifswald (1456), Trier (1454), Ingolstad (1459), Mainz (1476), Pressburg (1465), Wit­tenberg (1502), and Frankfurt a/Oder (1506). The two Scandinavian universities were Copenhagen (1478) and Uppsala (1477). See generally Coing, “Juristische Fakultat,” pp. 47-48; Rashdall, Universities 1:261-62^:51-57, 173-81, 186-206, 211-324.

tionately large numbers of men trained in law emerged as intellectual leaders during this period—surprising numbers of renaissance poets, historians, and classical scholars, both north and south of the Alps, had trained in law during their youth, and many practiced their profession while they were active in literature, scholarship and the arts.^[1835]

Styles of academic legal discourse changed during this period as well, and new styles of legal writing became prominent. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were the age of the treatise, the commentary, and the consilium in legal literature. The commentary—a voluminous, often multivolumed, explica­tion of a legal text—replaced the older Summas and gloss Apparatuses. Com­mentaries tended to be much longer than the earlier types of exposition and were not as closely tied to the text of the work they explicated as the Summas and Apparatuses had been. The treatise, a detailed and closely focused analysis and exposition of the law on some specialized topic—dowries or betrothal or wills, for example—was a new expository form. By the beginning of the fif­teenth century the sources of law had become so voluminous and the content of law so complex that ordinary practitioners, to say nothing of students and judges, found these specialized treatments indispensible. The consilium was a legal opinion rendered by a legal expert—often a teacher of law—in response to a request from a litigant, another lawyer, or a judge who needed guidance in applying the law to a particular case. Commentaries, treatises, and consilia, like legal services in this period, were both more specialized and more costly than their predecessors had been.