Medieval Legal Systems

In response to the editors' request from the editors of the Warsaw international journal, Quaestiones Medii Aevi Novae, for a placement of the history and historiography of medieval Poland in a broader medieval European framework, I use the law as a subject suitable for that analysis. As studied by general medievalists over the past quarter century, the law entails several phenomena which are comparable, that is, not strictly speaking similar, but conceptually consistent across time and space. Such phenomena include: litigation, disputes, and settlements; norms, rules, and normative frameworks; relationship between rule and process; areas of substantive law, such as property, violence and criminality, and status. After a brief survey of the quite disparate historiographies of these subjects produced in Poland and in the English-speaking world, the article, first, identifies the range of comparable phenomena salient for legal history, and, second, moves to a close case study of such phenomena, based on the Henryków Book. In particular, the Book's two authors present a rich array of disputes and settlements. The article uses that material to present a collective study of dispute settlement, and closes with an overview of those patterns in dispute settlement which are directly comparable to their counterparts elsewhere in medieval Europe—thus situating a key part of historical reality in a broader medieval perspective.

This piece is part of a "forum"—a venue for scholarly exchange used by the major US journal of legal history, Law and History Review, consisting of a series of comments by a group of colleagues to a leading article, followed by a response from the author of that article. The leading article, by Susan Reynolds, is "The Emergence of Professional Law in the Long Twelfth Century," L&HR 21 (2003), 347–66, and the respondents are Paul Brand, Charles M. Radding, and I. Reynolds's article was (and remains today) part of an important historiographical conjunction: a recognition of the variety of modes, or levels, of learning in, and use of, medieval law—additional to, and more or less distant from, schools. After briefly noting that conjunction, I consider its implications for the presence and significance of learned law in medieval Poland—especially for the perennial question of Poland's place in Europe, and of what Robert Bartlett has called Europe's "making."