THE LEGISLATIVE PROCESS

The making and compiling of decretal law under Honorius III has not been investigated fully. Yet how the law was made and collected – and by whom – and how compilation of a decretal collection related to the letters written during the pontificate are essential questions to consider. Of the pope's total correspondence, only a small proportion was selected for preservation for legal purposes. The pope might make many juridical points by letter but only those utterances which were known to and chosen by the canonist collectors had any chance of survival for legal and judicial use. Until the first decade of the thirteenth century collections of decretals were made by canonists for their own private purposes – for teaching and for judicial precedent. There was no notion until 1209–10 of an official collection of the decretals of a particular pontiff. For Honorius no private collections of decretals are known, as they are for his predecessor, Innocent III. The one official law collection, the Compilatio Quinta, came towards the end of the pontificate. The compiler, the canonist Tancred, took his texts exclusively from the papal registers of Honorius, as has been demonstrated convincingly. Reliance on this sole source suggests that no previous collections of Honorius's pronouncements were at hand or were known to him, and his method of operation lends further weight to this suggestion.