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Courts in the 12th and 13th Centuries:
- The most solemn judgment given by the highest authority is that given in a general assembly.
- Innocent IV at the council of Lyons in 1245
- the parliaments of Edward I of England
- the parlement of Paris; the ‘estates general’
- the cortes of Aragon and the justicia
- the Castilian cortes and legislation
- Multiplication of judges associated with the growth of administration
- England: the itinerant justices of Henry I and the central royal courts of Henry II; judges of feudal and manorial courts
- French royal justice associated with the expansion of the royal domain: baillis (English ‘bailiffs’) in the north sénéchaux (English ‘seneschals’) with associated juges in the south; feudal justice at least in some places
- Castile—the judicial function of royal governors, albedrios, gave judgments called fazanyas, ‘precedent’
- Aragon—characterized by urban justice (also characteristic of the Italian cities, the cities in the Low Countries, and some of the cities in modern Spain)
- By the middle of the thirteenth century every bishop in the West had his own court staffed by a professional judge called an ‘official’.
- Low-level rural justice
Customary law and custumals
- The problem of definition. The anthropologists’ definition of customary law won’t quite do because:
- There were written records
- There was written law
- Academic study of law was happening
- But some of the elements of the anthropologists’ customary law were there. The earl of Warenne and the quo warranto inquiries of Edward I. Efforts were made to preserve the customary system by writing it down in coutumiers (‘custumals’, books of customary law).
Coutumiers:
The
Treatise on the Laws and Customs of England Commonly Called Glanvill
(G. Hall ed. 1965) [1187 X 1189]
Coutumiers
de Normandie (J. Tardif ed. 3 vols. Rouen 1881–1903) (includes the Très
ancien coutumier (c. 1200) and Summa de legibus in curia laicali
(c. 1250))
Bracton
on the Laws and Customs of England (G. Woodbine ed. S. Thorne trans. 4
vols to date 1968– ) (not entirely the work of Henry of Bratton
(c.1210–1267), but a work of composite authorship the earliest parts of which
probably date from the 1220’s and 1230’s)
Le
conseil de Pierre de Fontaines (M. Marnier ed. 1846) (written in the
1250’s by a royal counsellor and bailiff of Vermandois, n.e. of Paris)
Li
livres de jostice et plet (L. Rapetti ed. 1850) (a mélange of Roman-canon
and customary law, rules of Orléans predominating in the customary parts,
perhaps composed by a student associated with the university of Orléans, c.
1260)
Les
établissements de Saint Louis (P. Viollet ed. 4 vols. 1881–1886) (a.
1273, cc. 1–9 concern the prevoté
of Paris and give the work its title; chapters 10–175 of book 1 are based on
the coutume of Tourraine-Anjou, the
primitive text of which is given in the third vol.; book 2 is based on the coutume of Orléans)
Phillippe
de Beaumanoir, Les coutumes de Beauvaisis (A. Salmon ed. 2 vols. 1899)
(first redaction 1283, by a ?poet, royal official and bailiff of the small
customary jurisdiction of the county
of Clermont en Beauvaisis near Paris)
La
très ancienne coutume de Bretagne
(M. Planiol ed. 1896) (anonymous coutumier in rule format from early 1300’s)
Le
grand coutumier de France (E. Laboulaye, R. Dareste eds. Paris 1869)
(uncritical edition of the 14th c. coutumier of the Île de France)
Le coutumier bourguignon glosé: (fin du XIVe siècle) (Michel Petitjean et Marie-Louise Marchand eds., Paris 1982).
Fueros:
Fuero
de Leon (1017/20)
Usatges
de Barcelona (almost certainly not, as it says, the work of Raymond
Berenguer I (1035–76), probably the first 80 or so chapters were compiled c.
1162; whether the whole work dates from that time is controverted)
Fuero
Viejo (1212), Castilian, but known only in a redaction of 1356
Fuero
General (1234/53), Navarre
Fori
Aragonum (1247)
Fuero
Real (1252/55), a genuine work of Alfons the Wise or of his court
Libro
de las Leyes (later known as Siete Partidas) (1256/1325), this
work seems to have gone through four redactions, how many of which date from
the time of Alfons the Wise is controverted
Fori
antiqui Valentiae (1301/41)
Some general points about coutumiers and fueros
- Chronology.
- The English are the earliest. This is not surprising granted the early development of English institutions.
- The Norman are the next. They differ from Glanvill and Bracton in that they make more effort to state substantive rules and in that Roman law influence is less obvious.
- The four great French ones from the end of the 13th century are all like Bracton in the sense that they attempt to integrate Roman and canon law. They are also like Bracton and Glanvill and unlike the Norman ones in that there is a speaker.
- As in England the 14th century brings a departure from the learned law, but the glossed coutume of Burgundy is an exception.
- Two things stand out among the large number of things that we might say about these efforts:
- Most of these products seem to be connected with specialization and teaching if not professionalization. Glanvill and Bracton are consciously trying to describe the custom and practice of the king’s central royal court, a relatively new institution at the time that they write and one that is greatly expanding. The first Norman custumal may be associated with an attempt to write down the rules for English administrators; the second is probably to be associated with an attempt to give guidance to the French bailli. Pierre des Fontaines and Beaumanoir were both royal baillis and were almost certainly trying to describe a jurisdiction that their successors would have to administer. The Livres de jostice et plet and the Établissements are more complicated but may be connected with law study at Orléans.
- Every one these documents is affected by Roman law. Glanvill, Bracton and the Norman ones are written Latin. All of them make reference to ecclesiastical institutions and thereby indirectly to Roman law. Beyond that the amount of the learned law in them and they way in which it is used varies considerably. Bracton and the Livres have the most Roman and canon law in them, citing it frequently and consciously making comparisons. Glanvill, Pierre and Beaumanoir are further away, though they all know some Roman and canon law and it affects their habits of thought. Intellectual influence is harder to see in the Norman custumals and the Établissements.
- Spain was somewhat different.
- The word is not coutume or coutumier but fuero. The word is derived from Latin forum and originally means a court, but the Spanish always have a notion that the fuero is in some sense promulgated by a king. Once promulgated, however, it becomes the privilege of the area for which it is promulgated. There are fueros for particular towns, a great many of them. Any town worthy of the name in medieval Spain had its own fuero. Certain types of people would have their own fuero. The fuero viejo of Castile in its original form was probably a fuero for the nobility. There were fueros for mozarabs, Christians living under Moslem rule, and for mudejars, Moslems living Christian rule.
- The continued vitality of the Visigoth code had considerable effect. Ferdinand III gave the fuero juzgo to many of the towns that he refounded in the areas that he took from the Moors.
- By the middle of the 13th century the Castilian monarchs came to regard the diversity among the fueros as a problem. It is difficult to organize a kingdom that is subject to a multiplicity of laws, and in Castile, precedent, fazanya, was also recognized as a source of law. Ferdinand III’s giving of the fuero juzgo to the newly reconquered cities was probably an effort at unification. The fuero real the first effort of his son Alfonso X (el Sabio) was clearly designed to restrict the privileges of the nobility and to get some unity in the law. Alfonso gave this fuero as the fuero for a number of cities. It may have applied in the central royal court, a court of appeal in Castile, as in France. It would seem, however, that it was not until the Alfonso XI (1311–1350) that the fuero real came to have a more general applicability and even here it was only in the absence of a specific provision in a local fuero.
- Alfonso X did not stop at the fuero real. He also had compiled large book about law in general. The work was reedited into seven parts and has been known ever since as the Siete Partidas. It is written in the vernacular and is quite comprehensive. It is of enormous importance for Spanish legal history. I have chosen, however, not to extract it in the materials for two reasons: (i) What it says about witnesses, marriage and wild animals it simply repeats the rules of the academic law, as it does in many other areas. (ii) There is no evidence that it was ever used as a working law-book in Alfonso’s time. Indeed, there is considerable evidence that it was not even regarded as authoritative in the courts until 1348, and then it was only a secondary authority. The work is, however, a political statement that the only way for Spain to achieve legal unity—and legal unity is intimately connected with political unity—is by the use of the academic law. This is a theme that will become more and more important as time goes on; it seems to have appeared first in Spain.
- The realities, however, in the Iberian Peninsula in the 13th century were considerably messier. There was no political unity, even within the individual kingdoms and there were four of them. The Usatges de Barcelona (Mats., § 10) shows us a coutume that probably was being used in the 13th century, though we must puzzle over exactly how it was being used. The word usatges is interesting. It is much closer to coutumier than fuero. What we are looking at is probably a redaction of the mid-twelfth century containing material that is considerably older, some of which probably goes back to the eponymous Raymond Berenguer I in the mid–11th century. Most of the scholarly effort with this document has been with recovering the earliest material. My efforts with it in connection with producing a translation for this class have suggested to me that some of it, perhaps a quite a bit of it, is probably later than the mid–12th century. I’m encouraged in this by the fact that the most recent editor of the text agrees with me, but not everyone agrees with him.
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