FORUM: RESPONSE

Variations in Professionalism

Susan Reynolds

Readers who look forward to a fierce debate may be in for a disappointment, as I find myself more or less in agreement with most of the points the three commentators have made about my article. I am grateful to them for the attention they have given it and for their pertinent and constructive comments.	1
To start with, Piotr Górecki is absolutely right about the difficulty of marking a boundary between those who used their general intelligence and experience at law and those we could call professionals, both during my long twelfth century and beyond.1 His thirteenth-century Abbot Peter illustrates it as well as does my twelfth-century Abbot Samson: both were intelligent and well-informed operators but not professionals in the sense either of earning their living through the law, or of belonging to any kind of professional association. One way of approaching the problem might be to try to establish the stages by which various types of legal activity were variously restricted in different jurisdictions and courts to men who belonged to some kind of group of those who knew, or were supposed to know, the rules. This was an aspect that I deliberately avoided in my article, partly because I suspected that restrictions became more fixed a bit later. But they may have been developing already.	2
Charles Radding is right to point to the evidence of real professionalism in Italy before 1100: he has usefully expanded my brief allusions to eleventh-century judges and notaries.2 Nevertheless, I still think that, even in Italy, the twelfth century marked a significant stage and that the long history of the dispute over Cerea, and the way it was ended, provide a good illustration of this. Despite the signs of professionalism and of Romanist influences, laymen played a bigger part than they would in the thirteenth century: both consilia were given collectively in assemblies in which laymen apparently participated in some way, if only by their presence, while the final judgment at Verona was given collectively by the consuls. I am sure that Radding is right to see influences going both ways between legal practice and legal education. I certainly did not intend to suggest otherwise, let alone to imply that the boundary between them was "hermetically sealed."	3
Paul Brand is right to direct attention to judges, whose qualifications and relation to litigators and to rulers became different in different jurisdictions.3 He is also right that I oversimplified the relation between the demands of rulers and the growth of professional law. My comparison of the register of writs with the texts of Roman and canon law was a rather wild jeu d'esprit: my wish to bring English law out of its traditional isolation and into the picture of text-based training would have been better achieved if I had mentioned the Year Books and books of statutes. Finally, I did not mean to suggest that the examination of witnesses was the only or most significant development in court practice: it was just one that I happened on. Others need to be studied.	4
I think we are all agreed that the changes in law to which I drew attention were important, that they took place at different times and in different ways in different parts of Europe, and that they deserve further investigation. Where I have real doubts, beyond those deriving from insufficient knowledge about all of it, is about any connection with "the making of Europe." I am not at all sure about the boundaries and defining characteristics of this Europe and the sense in which it formed the kind of unit that is implied by its "making." I suspect a Weberian model of development (of increasing rationality?) that distinguishes this whole Europe from the whole non-Europe outside. That worries me, even though my knowledge fades out too far from the supposed borders of Europe for me to be able to argue my doubts. I look to Piotr Górecki to provide more information and analysis of one area near to what is sometimes called the periphery of the supposed unit. But even within its supposedly corresponding "core" there was surely much more variation than is implied in many accounts—or in Paul Brand's reference to "the European norm" of the romano-canonical examination of witnesses. I suspect that practice in the taking and use of evidence, as in much else, varied for centuries, especially in local courts.	5
Local courts mattered: most law was done in them. From the twelfth century on (and maybe before, as in Italy), texts and such text-based training as there was must have promoted some degree of uniformity, but new variations also appeared. My guess—and as yet it can be no more—is that they tended to follow the boundaries of jurisdictions, which did not correspond with those of modern states. National historiographical traditions, which tend to focus primarily on high courts and foster comparisons, if any, chiefly between the areas of modern states, may therefore be misleading. But court practice and professional organization cannot have been determined merely by the boundaries of jurisdictions: among other factors I suggest the varying character of governments, varying contacts with schools, and variations in types of case according both to local economies and to the status of those subject to the jurisdiction. New uniformities and new variations appeared in my sloppily long twelfth century, though they are easier to trace after it. All this, however, just piles more speculation on to that of my original article.	6
I may have been too dismissive of the intellectuals: if so, it was partly intended to right what seems to me an imbalance. It does not mean that I do not admire either the great jurists of the later middle ages or the more obscure but creative thinkers of the twelfth century—including those who contributed to the Libri Feudorum. Of course much attention will continue rightly to be devoted to the learned law and the professionals who worked in high courts. But I hope that more attention will be given as well to the sort of legal history that will try to show how people in different parts of medieval Europe set about conveying land, securing debts, or going to law. How did they get advice, and how did those who advised them, wrote their deeds, or represented them in court learn their trade? I am encouraged that at least three legal historians think there is room for more work on the beginning of professionalism and the way it affected legal practice in and out of court.	7
Notes 1. See Piotr Górecki, "A View from a Distance," Law and History Review 21 (2003): 367–76. 2. See Charles M. Radding, "Legal Theory and Practice in Eleventh-Century Italy," ibid., 377–82. 3. See Paul Brand, "The English Difference: The Application of Bureaucratic Norms within Legal Systems," ibid., 383–87.

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