In the late Roman Empire, complexity and uncertainty created demand for responsa from the apostolic see. After the eleventh-century papal turn, new legislation and a different society generated new complexities and uncertainties. Decretals were not the only way to resolve them, but given the prominence of the tradition launched by Siricius and Innocent I, they were an obvious way. An unbroken chain of communication links the first and second decretal ages. Late Antiquity and the central Middle Ages need not be kept in separate compartments.

The strange and interesting bigamia rule remained a constant from the fourth century on, but the social worlds to which it was applied were different. A high proportion of the (very numerous) thirteenth-century clerics in minor orders did not have much to do with the clerical world, whereas their late Antique counterparts were presumably more or less integrated into the tight community around the city’s bishop. In the thirteenth century, the bigamia rule enabled popes and kings to deny clerical privileges to phony clergymen who enjoyed fiscal and judicial immunities, even though those clerics were supported by bishops whose power and profits they enhanced.

The word ‘hierarchy’ can mean both status hierarchy and a hierarchy of command. The managerial hierarchy of a modern company is instrumental, not embedded in a system of meaning and values. Late Antique hierarchies of command were on the other hand integrated in the value system, but even so this hierarchy of power should be distinguished from status hierarchy, though the two were intertwined. Some societies have more hierarchy of the status sort than others. The Church of late Antiquity was on the high end of the hierarchy scale. There was a multiplicity of gradations of status within the clergy, as well as a sharp differentiation between clergy and laity.