2. JENKS: TEUTONIC LAW 47 ful authenticity. Three centuries later, the great work of Gratian of Bologna, the Decretum Gratiani, though obviously the work of a private expounder, was received as an authori- tative statement of ecclesiastical law. Later still, in the year 1234, come the Five Books of Gregory IX., in 1298 the " Sext," or sixth book, of Boniface VIII., in 1317 the De- cretals of Clement V., the " Clementines." By this time, the Church has grown strong enough to repudiate the system which was its foster mother. Roman Law, after all, is the work of laymen ; and by this time the Church has become a sacred caste, and will acknowledge no secular authority. Alexander III. forbids the regular clergy to leave their cloisters to hear lectures on " the laws " and physic. In 1219 comes the Bull Super Speculam, in which Honorius extends the prohibition to all beneficed clerks.^ This is not the place in which to discuss the difficult question of the border line between the provinces of Canon and secular law. It is suf- ficient to say that, from the ninth century to the close of the Middle Ages, not the most autocratic monarch of Western Europe, not the most secular of lawyers, would have dreamed of denying the binding force, within its proper sphere, of the Canon Law. It had its own tribunals, its own practi- tioners, its own procedure ; it was a very real and active force in men's lives. And yet, it would puzzle an Austinian jurist to bring it within his definition of Law. The State did not make it ; the State did not enforce it. The case of the Law Merchant is equally instructive. Trade and commerce, almost extinct in the Dark Ages which followed the downfall of the Karolingian Empire, revived with the better conditions of the eleventh century, and were stimulated into sudden activity by the Crusades. The new transactions to which they gave rise were beyond the horizon of the law of the Fief and the old folk-law of the market. Gradually, the usages of merchants hardened into a cosmo- politan law, often at positive variance with the principles of local law, but none the less acquiesced in for mercantile trans- actions, and enforced by tribunals of commanding eminence and world-wide reputation, such as the courts of the Han- "' * Decretals of Gregory IX. (ed. Friedberg), Bk. III. Tit. 50, c. 10.
