Decretals, epistolae decretales, are papal letters that have a claim to universal validity and clarify questions of Church law. Already in Late Antiquity, petitioners would submit legal or disciplinary questions to the Roman emperor, who in response would provide authoritative answers in imperial rescripts. Papal decretal law was the product of an analogous procedure. Private parties would ask the pope to adjudicate their disputes, and in response the pope would set forth authoritative answers in decretal letters. The oldest fully preserved papal decretal is by Pope Siricius (384–99). Only with the pontificate of Alexander III (1159–81), however, did the number of decretals skyrocket and, as a result, there take place the further legal development and elaboration of the ius novum. Just two generations after Gratian’s Decretum (c. 1140), papal legislative acts had developed and changed canon law like never before.

Starting from the idea that all papal government in the twelfth century was responsive, this chapter uses papal letters from the period ca. 1148–79 to investigate how far the canons of the 1179 council were grounded in disputes that emerged locally. It has two principal intentions: firstly, to demonstrate how and when Pope Alexander III would have grappled with the issues tackled by the canons in the years prior to the council, and secondly to consider how far these problems emerged from the quotidian business of the Latin Church. Although grounded in the study of twelfth–century papal decretals, the letters sent by popes in response to queries, and requests for adjudication, the chapter also considers the evidence provided by other papal letters which were not included in contemporary legal collections. The result is a broader analysis of the processes of papal government and the question of the existence of a papal ‘agenda’ at the time, accompanied by consideration of the logic behind the inclusion of particular letters into legal collections and whether, and if so why, there were substantive differences between the measures put forward in the letters and those in the 1179 conciliar acta.