nomic treatises in the modern sense, but seek our
principles in the works dealing with general morality, in the Canon
Law, and in the commentaries on the Civil Law. 'We find the first
worked out economic theory for the whole Catholic world in the _Corpus
Juris Canonici_, that product of mediaeval science in which for so
many centuries theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, and politics were
treated....'[2]

[Footnote 1: Rambaud, _op. cit._, pp. 34-5; Cunningham, _Western
Civilisation_, vol. ii. p. 8.]

[Footnote 2: Roscher, _op. cit._, p. 5. It must not be concluded
that all the opinions expressed by the theologians and lawyers were
necessarily the official teaching of the Church. Brants says: 'It is
not our intention to attribute to the Church all the opinions of
this period; certainly the spirit of the Church dominated the great
majority of the writers, but one must not conclude from this that
all their writings are entitled to rank as doctrinal teaching' (_Op.
cit._, p. 6).]

There is not to be found in the writers of the early Middle Ages, that
is to say from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, a trace of any
attention given to what we at the present day would designate economic
questions. Usury was condemned by the decrees of several councils, but
the reasons of this prohibition were not given, nor was the question
made the subject of any dialectical controversy; commerce was so
undeveloped as to escape the attention of those who sought to
guide the people in their daily life; and money was accepted as the
inevitable instrument of exchange, without any discussion of its
origin or the laws which regulated it.

The writings of this period therefore betray no sign of any interest
in economic affairs. Jourdain says that he carefully examined the
works of Alcuin, Rabanas Mauras, Scotus Erigenus, Hincmar, Gerbert,
St. Anselm, and Abelard--the greatest lights of theology and
philosophy in the early Middle Ages--without finding a single passage
to suggest that any of these authors suspected that the pursuit of
riches, which they despised, occupied a sufficiently large place in
national as well as in individual life, to offer to the philosopher a
subject fruitful in reflections and results. The only work which might
be adduced as a partial exception to this rule is the _Polycraticus_
of John of Salisbury; but even this treatise contained only some
scattered moral reflections on luxury and on zeal for the interest of