Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- 1 The early Middle Ages: a comparative approach
- 2 A historical and institutional profile of the Roman empire in the fourth and fifth centuries
- 3 Excursus I: ‘Barbarians’
- 4 Historical and institutional profiles of the ‘new dominations’
- 5 Excursus II : The days of the week
- 6 Excursus III: Anglo-Saxon charters
- 7 Consensus by assembly
- 8 Excursus IV: Authority and consensus in judicial decisions
- 9 Public allegiance
- 10 Excursus V: The Anglo-Saxon writ
- 11 Private allegiance
- 12 Open legal systems
- 13 Excursus VI: Textual ‘coincidences’ in documentary forms
- Chronology of popes and sovereigns
- Appendix of sources
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - The early Middle Ages: a comparative approach
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- 1 The early Middle Ages: a comparative approach
- 2 A historical and institutional profile of the Roman empire in the fourth and fifth centuries
- 3 Excursus I: ‘Barbarians’
- 4 Historical and institutional profiles of the ‘new dominations’
- 5 Excursus II : The days of the week
- 6 Excursus III: Anglo-Saxon charters
- 7 Consensus by assembly
- 8 Excursus IV: Authority and consensus in judicial decisions
- 9 Public allegiance
- 10 Excursus V: The Anglo-Saxon writ
- 11 Private allegiance
- 12 Open legal systems
- 13 Excursus VI: Textual ‘coincidences’ in documentary forms
- Chronology of popes and sovereigns
- Appendix of sources
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The central theme of the early Middle Ages
The early Middle Ages comprise that period of European history between the fifth and eleventh centuries in which the political unity of the Western Roman empire was replaced by the religious unity of the Church. Indeed, the latter encompassed broader areas of continental Europe than did the former.
The early Middle Ages were also a period of European history which saw the advent of substantially uniform legal rules, types of government, documentary forms and modes of trial.
In the last years of the fourth century, however, there began a sequence of events which subjected the various European territories to immigration, or at least to the seizure of power, by populations displaying conspicuous differences (in terms of religion, forms of government, language and law) both from their new subjects and among themselves. These waves of immigration and seizures of power occurred in territories whose political and economic features had long lost their homogeneity, and these latter differences combined with the former to individualise the institutional framework of each territorial unit at the beginning of the period.
The central theme of the early Middle Ages, therefore, is the process by which these two sets of differences were compounded into a unitary framework to produce the first system of European common law.
Boundaries and the birth of Europe
European common law demonstrated a marked capacity for expansion. It followed the boundaries within which lived the peoples obedient to the Holy See and in the course of, and as a consequence of, this expansion it acquired and developed its own distinctive features.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Origins of the European Legal Order , pp. 1 - 4Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000