velopment begins in the Middle Ages the
law once more comes in contact with philosophy through the study of
both in the universities. What was the need of the time which
philosophy was called upon to satisfy? Following an era of anarchy and
disunion and violence men desired order and organization and peace.
They called for a philosophy that would bolster up authority and
rationalize their desire to impose a legal yoke upon society. The
period was one of transition from the primitive law of the Germanic
peoples to a strict law, through reception of Roman law as
authoritative legislation or through compilation of the Germanic
customary law more or less after the Roman model, as in the north of
France, or through declaration of the customary law in reported
decisions of strong central courts, as in England. Thus it soon became
a period of strict law. Scholastic philosophy, with its reliance upon
dialectic development of authoritatively given premises, its faith in
formal logic and its central problem of putting reason as a foundation
under authority, responded exactly to these demands. It is no misnomer
to style the commentators or post-glossators of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries the "scholastic jurists." For it was in large part
the philosophy that met the needs of the time so completely which
enabled them to put the Roman law of Justinian in a form to be
received and administered in the Europe of nine centuries later. While
they made the gloss into law in place of the text and made many things
over, as they had to be made over if they were to fit a wholly
different social order, the method of dialectical development of
absolute and unquestioned premises made it appear that nothing had
been done but to develop the logical implications of an authoritative
text. Men could receive the law of Bartolus so long as they believed
it but the logical unfolding of the pre-existing content of the
binding legislation of Justinian. It is interesting to note in
Fortescue an application of this to the rules of the common law in its
stage of strict law. He assumes that these rules are the principles of
which he reads in the commentators on Aristotle and that they may be
compared to the axioms of the geometrician. The time had not yet come
to call rules or principles or axioms in question. The need was to
rationalize men's desire to be governed by fixed rules and to
reconcile, in appearance at least, the change and growth which are