The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [13]
The problem was not lack of law. There was too much of it, what with papal and royal codices in old manuscripts, verbal laws, local customs, remnants and modifications of Roman law and Germanic tribal law. Much of it applied or made sense only in its place of origin. Much had been altered or reinterpreted by succeeding kings, popes and judges. Much was simply unintelligible. There was no single system which could be used to enforce unambiguous obedience throughout Europe. And, as travel increased, more and more people took their problems to the Papal Court in Rome, where the lack of lawyers was becoming a matter of urgency.
Law had always been part of the training in the trivium, whose rhetoric course was subdivided into demonstrative, deliberative and judicial argument. The ‘judicial’ part had been taught in Pavia and in Ravenna, the ancient capital of the Byzantine Viceroy, as well as in Rome itself. The major difficulty was that the material was piecemeal. The great compendium of Roman law created by the Emperor Justinian and known as the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Laws) had been lost since 603. There had also been a key to the laws, the Digest, which contained a summary of all the main points. Only two copies of the Digest had survived, and their whereabouts were unknown.
Then, in 1076, a liberal arts teacher called Irnerius found a copy of the Digest, most probably in the library of the Royal Law School in Ravenna, close to Bologna where he lived. The discovery of the Digest and the subsequent use which Irnerius and his successors made of it was of major importance in Western European history, because it put all Roman law into the hands of both the Church and the citizen. While this fact alone was to have far-reaching effects on the development of the West in economic and political terms, what was to have even greater impact was the way in which the Digest was edited.
The Digest was extremely complex and difficult to understand, often referring to situations and concepts of which the medieval European lawyer was only dimly aware. It was immensely sophisticated, compiled and refined as it had been through the centuries from early Rome until Justinian’s time to serve the greatest empire in the world. It was a system which those with the limited experience of the early Middle Ages could not easily comprehend. Irnerius made the Digest easier to use by ‘glossing’ it. Glossing was a technique already in use which involved the addition of notes, analyses and commentaries to the margin of a manuscript. These glosses were generally used as lecture notes by teachers interpreting the text for their students.
Bologna already had many students. Situated as it was at a central crossroads in northern Italy, it was ideally placed for international access. At the time of Irnerius it was already becoming known as Bologna docta (the learned). A small walled town nestling in the foothills of the Apennines on the edge of the rich agricultural plain of the river Po, Bologna in the eleventh century already had some of the tall slender towers which characterise the city to this very day. It was also a feature of the city, as it still is, that in bad weather you could cross town dry-shod through the arcades under which the stallholders sheltered, and where in the blaze of summer the citizens strolled in the cool, deep shadows.
Bologna had benefited from the quarrel between Pope and Emperor. The city had established relative independence from both, and in this atmosphere of freedom its secular dynamism had already made it both rich and liberal. To this ready market Irnerius brought his new approach to the subject of law. Its fame spread rapidly. There were soon more foreign law students than natives in Bologna.
At the monastery of St Stephen, Irnerius expounded his system. The aim was to elucidate the literal meaning of every sentence and to give coherence to the subject-matter as a whole. As an aid to the understanding