Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Preface to the First Edition
- Part One The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law
- I Introductory: the French Prelude to Modern Historiography
- II The Common-law Mind: Custom and the Immemorial
- III The Common-law Mind: the Absence of a Basis of Comparison
- IV The Discovery of Feudalism: French and Scottish Historians
- V The Discovery of Feudalism: Sir Henry Spelman
- VI Interregnum: the Oceana of James Harrington
- VII Interregnum: the First Royalist Reaction and the Response of Sir Matthew Hale
- VIII The Brady Controversy
- IX Conclusion: 1688 in the History of Historiography
- Part Two The Ancient Constitution Revisited: a Retrospect from 1986
- Index
IV - The Discovery of Feudalism: French and Scottish Historians
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Preface to the First Edition
- Part One The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law
- I Introductory: the French Prelude to Modern Historiography
- II The Common-law Mind: Custom and the Immemorial
- III The Common-law Mind: the Absence of a Basis of Comparison
- IV The Discovery of Feudalism: French and Scottish Historians
- V The Discovery of Feudalism: Sir Henry Spelman
- VI Interregnum: the Oceana of James Harrington
- VII Interregnum: the First Royalist Reaction and the Response of Sir Matthew Hale
- VIII The Brady Controversy
- IX Conclusion: 1688 in the History of Historiography
- Part Two The Ancient Constitution Revisited: a Retrospect from 1986
- Index
Summary
IT is one of the paradoxes of European historiography that the most recent authority on the character of feudalism, Professor F. L. Ganshof, should have laid it down that the feudalism of Lombardy can no longer be regarded as typical of that form of society as we see it in European life as a whole. A paradox because it was through the study of Lombard feudal law that the Renaissance historians first became aware of the existence of feudalism—though so abstract a term lay beyond their vocabularies—as a complex and variable set of institutions, whose place in the general pattern of European law (and, therefore, in history) required to be explained. The historians of law in western Europe, as we have seen, were students of written law before they turned to the unwritten customs and the archival deposits of particular regions; and Lombard feudalism possessed, in the Libri Feudorum, the only written systematization of feudal law which had become part of the general legal heritage of Europe. To the original Milanese studies of the law of the feudum, compiled in the twelfth century, had been added a number of imperial constitutions, chiefly Salian and Hohenstaufen, bearing upon the feudal law of descent and forfeiture; and the Libri Feudorum had thus a peculiar authority for any European lawyer concerned with the interpretation of these matters.
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- The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal LawA Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 70 - 90Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987