Author: Alice Taylor, Department of History, King's College London, London, UK

ABSTRACT:

This paper considers the relationship between the modern concepts of law and politics and the twelfth-century concept of ius (‘law, right’) in a chronicle written by a monk, Hugh of Poitiers, between the 1140s and 1160s. This chronicle documented the conflict over Vézelay Abbey, which involved some of the major ecclesiastical, monastic, royal and comital players of Western Europe. The paper argues that, by focussing on the chronicler's use of the concept of ius, this legal conflict is best understood, in our terms, as a political one, in that it involved arguments about how a just society should be ordered, rather than by the determination of the correct jurisprudential norms at stake in the process of litigation. Jurisdiction therefore involved contemporary legal actors setting out clear but competing understandings of that right order. This forces us to rethink any automatic separation between legal aims and political aims in our analyses of jurisdictional conflict in the mid-twelfth century.

Published on The Journal of Legal History, Volume 46, 2025 - Issue 1

https://doi.org/10.1080/01440365.2025.2456283

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