Conclusion - Lasting Model and Professional Community

Summary

The thirteenth-century coutumiers capture a moment of intellectual ebullience. They were part of the formative moments of the lay courts and the theorization of ‘law in practice’ and in this sense the coutumiers were the linchpin of French legal thinking until the Revolution – and beyond in some French colonies. They created something powerful in the French legal imagination, so powerful that their use only increased with time and eventually became official law when the kings demanded coutumiers to be written for all the regions of France in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This was all due to the ingenuity and intellectual creativity of the thirteenth-century lay jurists who borrowed, constructed, and effectively created a field of knowledge known as ‘customary law’.