Crowns & Constitutions: Recent Episodes
Marc Zarlengo
Crowns & Constitutions is dedicated to reexamining legal, political, and religious revolutions in their proper context of Western Christendom.
Before the election of Pope Gregory VII in 1073 A.D., decentralization within the Church led to secular entanglements in the feudal system while corruption seeped into the Church’s practices. Medieval kings and emperors even exercised control over clerical appointments. This episode covers Pope Gregory’s successful efforts to reassert Papal authority over the universal Church.
Magna Carta Bibliography
Medieval society between 476 and 1066 consisted of a patchwork of various sources of inter-dependent authority, both secular and Christian, that developed organically upon the foundations of the old Western Roman Empire. This episode summarizes that development in order to lay the groundwork for the Magna Carta.
Magna Carta Bibliography
Despite efforts to assert royal authority among powerful nobles by the Carolingian and West Saxon kings, Normandy and the Danelaw could not be subdued. This episode introduces the Normans and Danes under King Cnut as they establish a permanent impact on law and culture beginning in the ninth century.
Magna Carta Bibliography
Canon law, or the law of the Church, like the other areas of law we have discussed so far, developed organically to meet the needs of society. This episode covers both the Church’s legal structure and canon law’s early contributions to the development of the legal system in Western Christendom.
Magna Carta Bibliography
As feudalism developed, so did the villages and manors where the free and unfree peasants lived. Customary manorial law and manorial courts provided necessary legal and political structure for both lords and peasants. This episode explains who these peasants were and the law of the manor that governed their lives.
Magna Carta Bibliography
The discussion on feudalism is continued with a specific focus on the details of feudal law that governed the interactions between lords and vassals. As military campaigns moved from foot to horseback, knighthood became an important element to the feudal structure and the episode concludes with a discussion on chivalry.
Magna Carta Series Bibliography
To understand medieval political and legal society out which came the Magna Carta, it is necessary to understand feudalism, or at least the network of relationships that came to be called feudalism. In this episode, the basics of feudalism are discussed.
Magna Carta Series Bibliography
The Angles, Saxons and Jutes migrated to Britain and established seven great kingdoms and several smaller ones. Eventually these kingdoms were consolidated under the first English dynasty – the House of Wessex—who established the shire system to govern an emerging nation primarily based on free-peasant landholding. By maintaining many of their Germanic customs, the newly Christianized Anglo-Saxons developed their own systems that valued family and kinship ties, while maintaining a sense of political and social hierarchy.
Magna Carta Series Bibliography
The first powerful dynasty in former Roman Gaul was the Merovingians. Under the leadership of King Clovis I, who converted to Christianity with the aid of his wife St. Clotilde, Roman administrative practices were combined with the Germanic folk law to create an enduring legal structure. That structure formed the basis of medieval feudalism that slowly developed, in part, due to Clovis’ efforts to maintain loyalty among the Franks while expanding a budding empire.
Magna Carta Series Bibliography
Long before powerful feudal and monarchical systems fully matured by the thirteenth century, the medieval world in which the Magna Carta must be understood was taking root as Germanic tribes moved west into Britannia and Roman Gaul. These Germanic tribes already had a well-developed system of customs and rules of their own that they brought with them. This Germanic Folk Law, including tribal assemblies, Salic Law and Laws of Ethelbert, are covered in this episode.
Magna Carta Series Bibliography
We begin the story of the Magna Carta centuries before in 476 A.D. Upon collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Germanic tribes migrate west and begin to build their own kingdoms on the ruins of Rome. Yet, Roman law, including parts of Justinian’s Code, is adopted and preserved in some areas. In this episode, the historical landscape of Western legal tradition is discussed.
Magna Carta Series Bibliography
Welcome to this inaugural episode of the Crowns and Constitutions podcast. In this episode, the Magna Carta series is introduced. The Magna Carta’s role in modern American understanding of law and political history is noted in key Supreme Court cases. But is the Magna Carta what the Court and our academic textbooks really claim? How should the Magna Carta inform our understanding of “rights?”
Magna Carta Series Bibliography