8 - Implications of Circulating Text: Crafting a French Common Law

Summary

The eighth and final chapter examines the larger effects of textualization and vernacularization. The combination of the new technology of writing with the social choice of the vernacular permitted ideas about custom to circulate beyond their traditional local community ambit. Previously rooted laws and customs grew legs, and customary legal ideas could be transmitted though the circulation of texts and shared outside their local setting. In fact, this is when we start seeing the term ‘common law’ appear in French texts, a term scholars associate in this period with either royal law in England or with Roman and canon law as law that was common to Europe. This French ‘common law’ has been hotly debated. This chapter contributes to this debate by using the coutumiers to show how a French ‘common law,’ in the sense of a pool of common customary legal knowledge, was developing in France. This, in turn, implies more similarity between the legal cultures of France and England in this period than previously thought.