So law. It is a fundamental feature of the modern world in so many ways. Particularly in the western world we have an idea of "The Law" as a somewhat rigid and omnipresent substratum to society. We have an expectation that the law will be applied equally to members of society, even if in practice this is never the case, and that our law based off of a tradition of legal history and not simply concocted on the fly by the presiding official. We expect that the lawyers and judges who engage in the practice of law are experts who have devoted their life, or at least career, to the understanding of law and its practice.

Now what is the defining characteristic of law as we experience it today? According to my probable thesis advisor Wolfgang Mueller, one of the defining characteristics of law, as we and the Romans (from which most Western European law is ultimately derived on some level) have defined it, is the presence of lawyers in the practice and exercise of law. Whether this is Roman civil law, Canon law, or Common Law there is a relatively set course of study and mastery of this esoteric knowledge that would be practitioners are expected to have mastery over in order to practice law. In other words, we have an idea that law is not created or practiced arbitrarily.

But there is also a flip side of this, can we have law in the absence of lawyers? Western Europe after the fall of Rome was after all not exactly churning out large numbers of legal scholars. There were still of course codified bodies of "law" like the Salic Law of the Franks or the numerous law codes seen in England under Anglo-Saxon rulers, but the actual use of these documents as a legal guide is ambiguous at best. Indeed in the case of Anglo-Saxon law, figures such as Patrick Wormald have posited that the promulgation of law codes were not intended to actually be used in a court room setting, but instead as an ideological exercise demonstrating the king's ability to act as a Mosaic figure for his people as well as setting forth some of the guiding aims of the monarch's reign. Anglo-Saxon law for example was not practiced and exercised by lawyers as we understand them, and this holds true on the continent as well, though I am not as familiar with the historiography of the continent as I am England.

Our expectations of law were not necessarily the expectations of law that people had in the early Middle Ages. Indeed the execution and practice of law was quite fuzzy and nebulous compared to our modern notions of singular, unified, and non-contradictory. Anglo-Saxon law for example was not so much a single collection of legal codes, despite efforts such as Canute's Winchester Code, as it was a hodgepodge of different legal traditions, the Danelaw claimed one legal tradition, various cities and regions might claim another, the king is sitting there trying to get everyone on board with his newest law code, and then there's the Ecclesiastical courts and system which are totally different. It was in short, a bit of a mess.

But the Middle Ages did not lack lawyers throughout its time frame. Later in the Middle Ages we see lawyers stage a remarkable comeback alongside the emergence of Gratian's Decretum as the more or less end all be all of Canon law. His effort was not the first at creating a singular collection of "Law", but it was the most widely promulgated and broadly accepted collection of canon law. Earlier attempts at compiling one "law" were often contradictory, but not in a negative sense. For example the decretum of Ivo of Chartres made no attempt to eliminate contradictions between laws or canons, often collected from disparate sources such as Roman law, the Bible, and the writings of Church fathers. Indeed Ivo of Chartres reveled in these contradictions as options for the presiding official to choose from in application.

We see the emergence of law schools and universities in the 12th century, most famously at Bologna, and for the first time since the collapse of Roman power in the west we see lawyers in places like Italy, France, England, Iberia, and Germany. Now law for these lawyers was not the laws of their country or courts. Law here meant specifically canon law, not Common Law as in the Anglo-Saxon tradition or the specifically Roman law of say Justinian's code.

So did these lawyers do more or less what we associate with lawyers today? Well yes and no. I don't imagine that many Europeans or Americans would expect their system of law to be ultimately derived from the writings of Church fathers harmonized with the Justinian code for example, but lawyers in the Middle Ages were at the same time crafting traditions that we are very familiar with today such as jurisprudence. Our idea of lawyers though bear far more similarities with the lawyers of the psot-Gratian period of legal history than they do with the pre-Gratian era. In the early Middle Ages though there were no lawyers who decided law or brought cases and so on. Law in the early Middle Ages was a far less familiar process of accusation, reconciliation, threat of ordeal, differing jurisdictions, unclear application of rulings, and so on.

Our modern notion of law and lawyers have their roots in the Middle Ages and particularly the creation of dedicated law schools that were created in order to study canon law and Gratian's Decretum particularly. Before this time the practice and exercise of law was significantly less clear cut with contradictions, overlapping authorities, and so on all abounding across Europe, and it it worth pointing out that all contradictions and legal questions were not answered overnight after the Decretum was published.