The Project

The roots of this project extend back to a series of sessions organised for the Leeds International Medieval Congress in 2017: ‘Sources of Legal Authority: Ius Commune and Customary Law in Conversation’.

Through three sessions and a roundtable, historians of canon law, secular law, customary law, and Roman law considered the development of law across the central Middle Ages. The aim then was to draw together historians from across the many divides that still exist when studying medieval law, and particularly that of the twelfth century.

Over time, our thinking has evolved and expanded, drawing increasingly on the concepts of legal pluralism and multi-legalism, which historians have begun to use fruitfully when approaching Late Antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages. One of the driving questions of this current project thus concerns the utility of legal pluralism and multi-legalism when re-considering the legal past of the medieval west during the central Middle Ages.

Narratives of legal change have often emphasised the importance of the period between 1050 and 1250. The ‘re-discovery’ of Roman law provided rulers with new intellectual tools to define their power and authority, and at the same time gave rise to professional lawyers and judges, trained in a core body of written legal texts.

Yet these transformations produced paradoxical results: on the one hand the central Middle Ages witnessed the emergence of a pan-European legal culture, with popes and emperors claiming an increasingly broad-based legal authority; on the other, increasingly distinct bodies of national and/or regional laws started to take shape, beginning their journeys towards becoming the discrete legal systems of today.

In these narratives, by ca. 1250, different legal units and types of law were defined in relation to each other and often in oppositional terms: canon law against Roman and/or feudal law; the learned laws against unwritten local customs; and pan-European Romano-canonical law against national territorial laws such as the English Common Law or the Droit commun in France.

These debates are shaped by a particular way of thinking about the relationship between law and territorial borders that in turn has been informed by nineteenth-century concepts of national laws. Whether we think of Napoleon’s Code Civil of 1804, Savigny and the idea of Volksrecht, or Bentham’s interpretation of the roots of English Common Law, these ideas remain central to modern understandings of the legal transformations of the central Middle Ages. They provide the roots for a post-Westphalian model of a territorial state possessing clear borders—albeit ‘states’ operating at levels ranging from an Italian commune to the universalist claims of the papacy.

Moreover, and more worryingly, these claims are becoming once more central to arguments of legal sovereignty, with the medieval legal past exerting a powerful effect on present-day nationalist narratives and the debates these narratives generate.

This project aims to challenge this model, investigating the medieval legal past between 1050 and 1250 through the lens of multi-legalism and legal pluralism, ie the existence of multiple, overlapping legal jurisdictions which functioned concurrently, and not necessarily in opposition or in conflict with each other.

We’ll investigate the existence and problematisation of jurisdictions by contemporaries; look at how contemporary legal actors navigated multiple, overlapping jurisdictions; and then look at whether and how the large-scale political clashes that still provide the centre-pieces for historical interpretations of the period resonated with those actors.

We’re doing this through a series of workshops, podcasts, and blogs.