THE NEW LEARNING OUTSIDE ITALY

Already in the early twelfth century there is evidence of the acceptance of the new Bolognese learning across the Alps in south-west France. This area, Provence in its wider medieval meaning, including Languedoc and the Dauphine, was fertile ground for such influence.

The summa on the Institutes is the earliest of a group of civil law works produced in Provence, such as the Exceptiones Petri and its related collec­tions, known as the Tübingen and Ashburnham Law-Books (the desig­nations refer to the locations of the manuscripts). Unlike the Bolognese works, whose authors are identified, the authors of these works are mostly anonymous. The Provencal writings are further distinguished from those produced at Bologna by being selective in the material taken from the Corpus iuris and by their attempts to organise that material under headings, sometimes loosely related to the order of the Institutes, rather than adhere to the arrangement of Code and Digest in the Bolognese manner. These works were at one time considered by schol­ars to be of Italian origin but from a pre-Bolognese period. Now they are recognised as the products of jurists who were influenced by Bolognese scholarship but felt free to abandon the latter's casuistic con­centration on textual detail.

The reputation of the Rhone valley school extended outside Provence and it is significant that the Englishman Nicholas Breakspear, the future Pope Adrian IV was attracted as a young man to study there. The Rhone valley school also attracted civil lawyers with an international reputation, such as the glossator Rogerius, who had studied and taught at Bologna. His main work is an unfinished summa of the Code, which shows the influence of the Summa trecensis and of Lo codi. He is also probably the author of a dialogue, Enodationes quaestionum super Codice, in which the author and Jurisprudentia discuss the nature of law and its interpreta­tion in a colourful and imaginative way. Rogerius's unfinished summa was completed by the glossator Placentinus, an outspoken and somewhat arrogant man, who was forced to leave Bologna in the 1160s. He moved the teaching of civil law from Provence westwards to Montpellier, where he established a school. Placentinus taught there successfully, and pro­duced his own tummae, both of the Code and of the Institutes. After his death in 1192, teaching of civil law at Montpellier ceased but was revived a quarter of a century later.

Meanwhile the march of the new Roman law was continuing. At the end of the century, it is attested in Catalonia. Petrus de Cadorna, who went on to become a cardinal, was the first Catalan known to have acquired a purely civil law training and he was able to supply Latin translations of two Greek constitutions in the Code (C.3.10.1 and 2). Already in the 1160s an apparatus to the Institutes, probably written by Albericus, a minor Bolognese glossator, was produced at Rheims. Civil law was also taught in schools founded at Toulouse and Orleans.

In England, teaching of the new legal learning is associated with the Lombard Vacarius, who was recruited from Bologna in the 1140s by Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury specifically to assist him in the ‘unheard-of disputes', in which he was engaged, particularly with the papal legate. Vacarius might have done some informal teaching in the cathedral school at Canterbury but his formal teaching began not, as was until recently thought, around 1150 in Oxford, but in the 1170s and further north. After arrival in England he was ordained and at some point moved to the northern province of York, where he acted as legal advisor to the archbishop of York. His personal teaching was probably in the cathedral school at Lincoln.

For the benefit of his students who could not afford the full civil law texts, Vacarius compiled a collection of essential texts taken from Digest and Code, including the Tret libri. It was arranged in nine books, in imitation of the (medieval) Code, and was called the Book of the Poor (Liberpauperum). In the 1190s this book was used as a textbook at Oxford, where the civil law was taught together with canon law. The students, known as pauperistae, gained a reputation for their arrogant assumption of superiority, despite a somewhat superficial knowledge of the civil law. Vacarius had serious pupils, however, who kept in touch with developments in Bologna and who formed a school, whose ideas can be discovered in the glosses to the manuscripts of the Liberpauperum.

The civil lawyers at Bologna were generally laymen but most of those who studied the civil law outside Italy were churchmen, primarily con­cerned with the administration of justice in the church courts.

As more universities were founded, it was accepted that law in a uni­versity setting meant the study not of the local customary law but of civil and canon law. They were the only forms of law which had the univer­sal character expected of a university discipline. Indeed no European university offered instruction in the law of the land until the seventeenth century. As a result, in every European country a university-trained lawyer was necessarily a Roman lawyer. Such lawyers came to share a common legal culture, based on the same texts, expounded in the same language, Latin.

The demands made on the glossators included a clarification of the elements of a rational procedure for implementing the law, of the nature of legislative authority and of the relationship between local law and the imperial law. Although there were several sporadic texts in the Corpus iuris on all these subjects, none of them was treated there in a coherent and detailed manner. Political realities required the twelfth-century civil lawyers to give them special attention and their views on these subjects must now be considered.

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