COMMENTATORS

The Glossators laid the foundation for study of the Roman legal texts. The development was continued by a new school, called the Commentators, emerging in the fourteenth century, who continued the development of the Roman texts for the needs of practice.

The Commentators’ characteristic form of literature was the larger-scale commentary on the Roman texts, beyond the scale of the gloss. However, the individual texts had now been mastered, and so the Commentators were also able to develop the discussion of specific areas of law independently from the arrangement of the texts in the Roman sources. In addition to commen­taries, therefore, the Commentators also produced numerous monographs on specific legal topics. The other substantial form of literature produced by the Commentators was the collection of consilia, or legal opinions. This attention to the needs of practice led to the Commentators interpreting the Roman texts freely, to meet these needs. They also had to account for con­temporary developments in the law, such as local legislation, and not simply apply the Roman law. Nonetheless, the Roman law was always there as a subsidiary source, to supplement and fill in the gaps in the contemporary law. This process of blending Roman, feudal and canon law was important in the development of the ius commune (discussed below).

The two most important of the Commentators were Bartolus (1314—57) and his pupil Baldus de Ubaldis. Baldus was the author of a large number of consilia, of which around 2,500 survive. These opinions take in the whole range of the law, including not only the Roman texts but also canon law and feudal law.

Bartolus was the author of a very large commentary on the whole of the Corpus Iuris Civilis. This was the major work of the period, continuing to be used for centuries afterwards. This was often to the extent of overshadow­ing other writers, and it was said that nemo iurista nisi Bartolista (“no one is a jurist except a Bartolist”).