from 15 - Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
The will of the prince and the law
In the middle of the twelfth century, Gratian completed his Concordia discordantium canonum – a ‘Concord of Discordant Canons’, later called simply the Decretum – and, unlike most earlier compilers of canonical collections, he began with a series of texts and comments on the various sources and types of law. Gratian did more than gather texts together; he unified and explained them, and in some cases he rejected the authority of some as being out-of-date or superfluous. The Decretum was the first collection of the high Middle Ages in which the compiler commented on the texts he brought together. It was an important step in medieval jurisprudence.
Gratian made a general statement about law at the beginning of the Decretum: ‘The human race is ruled by two things: natural law and custom.’
He followed this definition with discussion of the types of human law: unwritten custom, civil law, the law of a city or a people, and the different types of laws in classical Roman law. A few pages later, he ended his treatment of legislation by defining how a law was validated: ‘Laws are established through promulgation and validated when they are approved by the acceptance of the people.’ Gratian's treatment of law was in the mainstream of legal thought in the twelfth century. But he presented only raw, unassimilated ideas. He thought that the source of law might be a prince or the time-honoured customs of people.
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