Английский язык, текст по праву

Roman Law, Canon Law & English Law

Between 1050 and 1150 there emerged in Western Europe, for the first lime, a class of professional lawyers, law schools, law treatises, hierarchies of courts, and a rational science of law. European jurists, working on the primitive tribal customs of the various peoples, on the liturgy and sucraments of the Church, and on Justinians Digest, which was rediscovered in about 1100 after some live centuries of oblivion, read into these materials certain principles which were new lo the history of law.
It should be stressed that Roman Law in the 11th and 12th century was largely «dead» law, existing only in books; with a few exceptions people were not governed by Roman Law and courts were not bound by it. Indeed, the rules of Justinians Digest bore little relationship to the actual situation in which Europe found itself. But the jurists of the universities literally revived Roman Law, breathed new life into it, so that gradually it came to have an impact upon the law both of the Church and of the secular states.
The older Roman Law was more empirical in character stating the particular legal consequences which flowed from particular acts; the medieval law, whether Roman or Canon or national, related the rules to a system of concepts.
The law of the Church – Canon Law – was, of course, a living law applied in the ecclesiastical courts. The living secular law was the folklaw and official law of the local, tribal, imperial polity. But the emerging monarchies of the later Middle Ages were strongly influenced by Roman and Canon Law, in developing their national legal systems.
In England the impact of both Roman and Canon Law was felt quite strongly in the creation of the English legal system under Henry II and in its subsequent development in the 13th century, although by the 14th and 15th centuries English law has developed its own unique character and its own independent principles of growth.