III - Origins of jurisdiction: hierarchy and consent, 1250–1350

Summary

So far we have considered some constitutional concepts of the medieval jurists. Between 1250 and 1350 their ideas were assimilated into new writings – a great body of them – which now dealt overtly with political philosophy. Often these writings were oddly preoccupied with problems concerning the origins of government; sometimes their authors suggested that the origin of all legitimate government must lie in the consent of the governed. These are the themes we shall explore next. They involve issues that remained of central importance in Western political thought down to the time of Grotius and Hobbes and Locke.

The new writing was stimulated partly by the rediscovery of Aristotle's Politics, partly by the real-life circumstances of the thirteenth century. The Politics, one of the last of Aristotle's works to be translated, opened up a new world of thought to medieval men. It showed them that political theory need not be merely a branch of jurisprudence; it could be an autonomous science in its own right, a proper field of study for philosophers. But, while the form of the new writing was influenced by Aristotle, its content was derived in large part from the actual experience of medieval society and from the reflections of earlier generations of jurists on that experience.

The content of the new political theory was also influenced by actual conflicts that occurred in the second half of the thirteenth century. New frictions arose between the secular and ecclesiastical hierarchies and within the ecclesiastical hierarchy itself.