scholarly journals The Procedure and Practice of Witness Testimony in English Ecclesiastical Courts, c.1193–1300

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 114-130
Author(s):  
Sarah B. White
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Standard Procedure ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Public Knowledge ◽  
Witness Testimony ◽  
Church Courts ◽  
Ecclesiastical Courts

In the twelfth century, the English church courts made considerable use of compurgation and of sworn members of the community to aid in the resolution of disputes, but by the end of the thirteenth century, academic canon law depended almost entirely on witness testimony. Romano-canonical proceduralists established rules for examining witnesses, rejecting testimonies and resolving conflicts. However, these academic ideals were not always possible or even desirable in practice. Although Roman procedure required witnesses to be eyewitnesses, English ecclesiastical practice allowed witnesses to testify to public knowledge. Furthermore, individuals who were not qualified to testify did so regardless, and their testimonies were not excluded even following exceptions. This is not to say that standard procedure was not followed; more often than not, it was. However, these differences between theory and practice indicate that practitioners (and perhaps judges) in the English ecclesiastical courts were experimenting with ways to use witness testimony beyond the confines of the academic law.

Who Was the Author ofGlanvill?Reflections on the Education of Henry II's Common Lawyers

1990 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-127
Author(s):  
Ralph V. Turner
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Reforms ◽  
English Society

The legal treatise calledGlanvillis proof that by the end of Henry II's reign men capable of shaping the custom of the Englishcuria regisinto a systematic law book were present at Westminster.Glanvillis “the first textbook of the English common law.” This treatise was written near the end of Henry II's reign and since the thirteenth century, it has borne the name of his justiciar, Ranulf de Glanvill, although not many scholars today accept his authorship. Why, then, should we raise once more the question: Who was the author ofGlanvill?It remains a valid question because it affords an opportunity for reflection on questions concerning schools, learning, and twelfth-century English society. It forces us to consider the connections among the emerging English common law, the schools, the Scholastic method, and the study of Roman and canon law. It requires us to consider the contributions of Roman and eccesiastical law to Henry II's legal reforms.

The Two Jurisdictions: Theological and Legal Justifications of Church Property in the Thirteenth Century

1987 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 75-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Coercive Force ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Universal Jurisdiction ◽  
The Other ◽  
The One

With the revival of Roman and the development of canon law in the twelfth century a doctrine of supreme and universal jurisdiction began to be expounded with increasing vigour by the papacy. By the thirteenth century those learned in Roman and canon law began to distinguish in more subtle ways between jurisdiction on the one hand and holy orders on the other; between the capacity to make law and to discover law; between legislating and adjudicating; and, most importantly, between ruling and owning. Jurisdiction had become one of a cluster of terms used to define aspects of rulership, authority, prelacy, and imperium. It combined the idea of rightful administration with the legitimate and authoritative use of coercive force.

The Council of London of 1342

1971 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 147-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brenda Bolton
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
Church Courts

Now that the statutes formerly ascribed to Winchelsey and Reynolds have been shown to derive from other sources, those of John Stratford, issued after the Second Council of London (1342), are seen to stand out as the most significant body of provincial legislation in the later Middle Ages. Their relative importance is enhanced by the paucity of such legislation in this period in comparison with the considerable volume produced in the course of the thirteenth century.On investigation, Stratford’s constitutions appear significant in the corpus of medieval ‘administrative’ canon law. Not only do they show signs of the friction existing between the lay and ecclesiastical jurisdictions and experienced both by Pecham and Winchelsey, but also of the recurring clerical concerns, frailties of conduct, and malpractices of church courts and officials alike. Provincial legislation springs partly from local imperfections, and partly from more general circumstances. Political considerations may have been critical in the decision to issue constitutions. There is justification, therefore, for first examining the political context in which these constitutions arose.

The ‘Poenitentiale' of Robert of Flamborough: An Early Handbook for the Confessor in its Manuscript Tradition

Traditio ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 541-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Firth
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Manuscript Tradition

The Poenitentiale or Liber Poenitentialis of Robert of Flamborough, canon penitentiary of the Abbey of St. Victor at Paris, is a practical manual which made available to the ordinary confessor of the early thirteenth century the fruit of the speculation of canonists and theologians as well as the jurisprudence of popes — all of which had been accumulating during the latter half of the twelfth century. It applied the canon law of the time to such matters as marriage, ordination, simony, usury and feudal contracts. Such a work is of obvious interest to the scholar, and two recent articles, one by Stephan Kuttner in Traditio in 1944 and the other by Pierre Michaud-Quantin in Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médiévale in 1959, have dealt with it at some length. Some features have come to my attention which apparently had escaped the notice of others.

scholarly journals “Twelfth-Century Italian Confraternities as Institutions of Pastoral Care,” Journal of Medieval History 42 (2016)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neslihan Senocak
Keyword(s):  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Spiritual Care ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Medieval Italy

When studied through canon law and scholastic pastoraliaproduced in the universities in the thirteenth century and beyond, medieval pastoral care comes across as spiritual care, more specifically the administration of sacraments and preaching, provided by the clergy for the faithful. This article complicates that view by arguing that in the twelfth century, the laity alongside the clergy was active in the provision and organisation of pastoral care. The sources examined are the surviving statutes of five religious confraternities – along with the obituaries and sermons in two cases – in Italy that flourished in the twelfth century and before. Each of these confraternities was centred around a church, established after an apostolic ideal, included laymen and women and local pastoral clergy of all levels, met regularly to celebrate the Eucharist, prayed for the dead members and made public confessions. Members prayed for and attended to the corporal needs of each other in case of sickness. In the final analysis, these twelfth-century confraternities appear astransitional institutions between the early medieval monasticconfraternities focusing on prayer and the late medieval andrenaissance confraternities focusing on charity. Their study opens a window onto the lay expectations of and contribution to pastoral care in medieval Italy.

Lying and Perjury in Confessors’ Manuals

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Corran
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
The Subject

Confessors’ manuals were the most important genre in which practical thought about lying and perjury was developed during the thirteenth century. This chapter argues that confessors’ manuals shared an interest in moral dilemmas with Peter the Chanter’s Summa. A comparison of the treatment of a famous dilemma concerning a lie to save a life in Robert of Courson, Raymond of Penafort, and Hostiensis reveals the similarities in their approach. The key difference between confessors’ manuals and the practical theologians of the late twelfth century was the degree to which they quoted material from canon law. This chapter investigates this influx of legal material into pastoral writings and explains the reasons for the change. It suggests that engagement with canon law did not mean that the ethics of lying and perjury became indistinguishable from canonical thought on the subject.

A Short Survey of Yemeni Sufism from Its Inception up to the Thirteenth Century

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Muhammad Aziz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Mountainous Area ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Short Survey ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Intellectual Activities

This paper analyzes the historical conditions of Yemen’s Sufi movement from the beginning of Islam up to the rise of the Rasulid dynasty in the thirteenth century. This is a very difficult task, given the lack of adequate sources and sufficient academic attention in both the East and theWest. Certainly, a few sentences about the subject can be found scattered in Sufi literature at large, but a respectable study of the period’s mysticism can hardly be found.1 Thus, I will focus on the major authorities who first contributed to the ascetic movement’s development, discuss why a major decline of intellectual activities occurred in many metropolises, and if the existing ascetic conditions were transformed into mystical tendencies during the ninth century due to the alleged impact ofDhu’n-Nun al-Misri (d. 860). This is followed by a brief discussion ofwhat contributed to the revival of the country’s intellectual and economic activities. After that, I will attempt to portray the status of the major ascetics and prominent mystics credited with spreading and diffusing the so-called Islamic saintly miracles (karamat). The trademark of both ascetics and mystics across the centuries, this feature became more prevalent fromthe beginning of the twelfth century onward. I will conclude with a brief note on the most three celebrated figures of Yemen’s religious and cultural history: Abu al-Ghayth ibn Jamil (d. 1253) and his rival Ahmad ibn `Alwan (d. 1266) from the mountainous area, andMuhammad ibn `Ali al-`Alawi, known as al-Faqih al-Muqaddam (d. 1256), from Hadramawt.

Bastard Feudalism and the Framing of Thirteenth-Century England

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Coss
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

In the introduction to his great work of 2005, Framing the Early Middle Ages, Chris Wickham urged not only the necessity of carefully framing our studies at the outset but also the importance of closely defining the words and concepts that we employ, the avoidance ‘cultural sollipsism’ wherever possible and the need to pay particular attention to continuities and discontinuities. Chris has, of course, followed these precepts on a vast scale. My aim in this chapter is a modest one. I aim to review the framing of thirteenth-century England in terms of two only of Chris’s themes: the aristocracy and the state—and even then primarily in terms of the relationship between the two. By the thirteenth century I mean a long thirteenth century stretching from the period of the Angevin reforms of the later twelfth century on the one hand to the early to mid-fourteenth on the other; the reasons for taking this span will, I hope, become clearer during the course of the chapter, but few would doubt that it has a validity.

Studies in Bracton

Traditio ◽  
1948 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 61-104
Author(s):  
H. G. Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Canon Law

I have elsewhere drawn attention to a manuscript containing three works on canon law that Bracton laid under contribution, namely Tancred's Ordo judiciarius, Raymond of Peñafort's Summa de matrimonio and William of Drogheda's Summa aurea. This manuscript has been ascribed to the late thirteenth century by Dr. M. R. James; but dating a manuscript by the character of the handwriting can rarely be exact, and there seemed a possibility that the book might prove to be one that Bracton himself had used or that was related in some way to such a one. Through the kindness of the Council of Gonville and Caius College I have been able to examine the manuscript at leisure and, while it tells us less than might have been hoped, yet it does seem to throw a little fresh light upon Bracton's treatise and one of Bracton's sources.

Byzantine Scyphate Bronze coinage in Greece

1961 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 42-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. M. Metcalf
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
The Other ◽  
Purchasing Power ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Market Place ◽  
Fourth Crusade ◽  
Unusual Form

The Byzantine coinage in the twelfth century was of three kinds. There were gold nomismata, with a purchasing power which must have been a good deal greater than that of a present-day five-pound note, and also nomismata of ‘pale gold’—gold alloyed with silver—of lower value; at the other extreme there were bronze coins, smaller than a modern farthing, which were the coinage of the market-place; intermediate, but still of low value, there were coins about the size of a halfpenny, normally made of copper lightly washed with silver. The silvered bronze and the gold were not flat, as are most coins, but saucer-shaped. The reason for their unusual form is not known. Numismatists describe them as scyphate, and refer to the middle denomination in the later Byzantine system of coinage as Scyphate Bronze, to distinguish it from the petty bronze coinage. Scyphate Bronze was first struck under Alexius I (1081–1118). Substantive issues were made by John II (1118–43), and such coinage became extremely plentiful under Manuel I (1143–80) and his successors Isaac II (1185–95) and Alexius III (1195–1203). After the capture of Constantinople in the course of the Fourth Crusade, the successor-states to the Byzantine Empire at Nicaea, Salonica, and in Epirus continued to issue scyphate bronze coinage, although in much smaller quantities, until after the middle of the thirteenth century.

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