rare exceptions, clear that there was no
legitimate authority which was not just, and which did not make for
justice.

It is here that we find the real meaning of the second great political
principle of the Middle Ages, that is the supremacy of law; that it is
the law which is the supreme authority in the State, the law which is
over every person in the State. When John of Salisbury, the secretary of
Thomas a Becket, wishes to distinguish between the prince and the
tyrant, he insists that the prince is one who rules according to law,
while the tyrant is one who ignores and violates the law.[26] And in a
memorable phrase, Bracton, the great English jurist of the latter part
of the thirteenth century, lays it down dogmatically that the king has
two superiors, God and the law.[27] There is an absurd notion still
current among more ignorant persons--I have even heard some theologians
fall into the mistake--that men in the Middle Ages thought of authority
as something arbitrary and unintelligible, while the truth is that such
a conception was wholly foreign to the temper of that time. It is quite
true that the political life of the Middle Ages seems constantly to
oscillate between anarchy and despotism, but this is not because the men
of those days did not understand the meaning of law and of freedom, but
because they were only slowly working out the organization through which
these can be secured. The supreme authority in the mediaeval state was
the law, and it was supreme because it was taken by them to be the
embodiment of justice.

It is again out of this principle that there arose another great
conception which is still often thought to be modern, but which is
really mediaeval, the conception that the authority of the ruler rests
upon and is conditioned by an agreement or contract between him and the
people. For this agreement was not an abstract conception, but was based
upon the mutual oaths of the mediaeval coronation ceremony, the oath of
the king to maintain the law, and to administer justice, and the oath of
the people to serve and obey the king whom they had recognized or
elected. The people do, indeed, owe the king honour and loyal service,
but only on the condition that he holds inviolable his oath. The ruler
who breaks this is a tyrant, and for him there was no place in mediaeval
political theory. This conception was expressed in very plain and even
crude terms by Manegold in the eleventh century when he sai