Lombardist Glosses on Feudal Custom: Text, Gloss and Usus Feudi

Abstract

The first substantial text to survive about fiefs and vassals is called by modern convention the Libri feudorum. Every legal historian knows at least something about the Libri feudorum: that the text is a collection of short treatises composed by different people, probably in Pavia and certainly Milan, spanning most of the twelfth century; that the text eventually joined the Corpus Iuris Civilis as the final section of the Novels or Decima collatio de feudis where, glossed by Accursius, it served as the foundation for what would become the later medieval ius commune feudorum. The text is an intriguing combination of different genres. The earliest identifiable version, known as the recensio antiqua, clearly consists in part of commentaries on the constitution issued by Conrad II at the siege of Milan in the year 1037 (the so called Edictum de feudis). It also contains descriptions of custom according to various courts in the kingdom of Lombardy, in the second half of the text specifically that of Milan but Pavia, Verona, Parma, Lucca, Pisa, and Mantua amongst other places are also mentioned. The later versions of the text also contain authentic legislation from the emperors Lothar III and Frederick Barbarossa, as well as a scattering of texts implausibly attributed to an emperor Henry (presumably Henry III was intended) and which are probably writing-exercises or a capricious form of private treatise. The purpose of the following discussion is not to give a resumé of the textual and exegetical history of the Libri feudorum, but to introduce some fresh information about what Lombardist legal scholarship on lords, vassals and fiefs looked like at the time the first recension of the Libri feudorum was first reaching circulation. In substance, the object is to introduce a number of mid-twelfth-century glosses in manuscripts of the Lombarda and to offer a preliminary evaluation of them with an eye to what they might tell us about the Libri feudorum as a new literary venture. Principally although not exclusively on account of the early, commentary-like materials, the Libri feudorum are commonly thought to represent a degree of scholarly endeavour, of apparently bookish if not actually academic discussion. It is that last characteristic which is of interest here. Much has been written about the surviving Lombardist commentaries or summae on the Lombarda and some attention has been paid to the relationship between this literature and the early history of the Libri feudorum. The glosses about to be discussed add a further level of detail to the mid-twelfth-century landscape and allow us to address with greater precision the questions of how scholarly a source the Libri feudorum are and how useful the description of important parts of the text as academic is.