A kingdom had to have a considerable population and geographical size
and needed a more complex machinery of government.^5 Conferring the
imperial title on Charles IV in 1346, Pope Clement VI lauded that status
sacri imperiinot only as the last of the four empires prefigured in the
Old Testament, but also as a ‘state’ which was of great extent spatially
(spatiose dilatatus). In Clement’s eyes the principality of the ‘lord of the
world’ was not universal, however, for canon law showed a previous
pope annulling the Emperor Henry VII’s judicial proceedings against the
King of Sicily for conspiring against him only outside the empire’s
historical boundaries. Kingdoms were the political realities.^6
The status regni, no less than the status ecclesiae, was a complex
institution which existed to be constantly reformed, and the notion of
reform gradually changed from the restoration of an ancient and
customary state of things to constant improvement by written laws to
meet the new ‘necessities’ of rulers and peoples. In the acts of the
emperors of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the meaning of refor-
matiowas extended from the simple restoration of the property rights
of particular churches to law-making for the peace and prosperity of the
whole status regnior status imperii.^7 Rudolf of Habsburg worked hard
for ‘the reform of the collapsed state (collapsi status) of the empire’ and
of ‘the peaceful state of the land’.^8 Even without political crisis, law
needed changing pro reformatione sacri imperii et pro regimine totius
respublicae. As a privilege of Charles IV put it in 1348, laws which were
theoretically profitable were often found not so by experience; human
statutes required to be ‘reformed with new sanctions’ and new antidotes
provided for newly emerging problems.^9 Gratian’s Decretum and
secular law-books like Eike von Repgow’s or Bracton’s or Beaumanoir’s
were attempts to incorporate the results of the first surge of reforming
legislation into comprehensive accounts of their countries’ laws and
customs.^10 Vivid illuminations in manuscripts of the Decretumand the
Sachsenspiegelobeyed the ancient writers’ dictum that memory even of
254 Monarchical State of the Later Middle Ages
(^5) Aegidius Romanus, De regimine principum Libri III(Rome 1556: repr. Frankfurt, 1968),
243–5 (book 3, pt. 1, c. v); cf. The Defensor Pacis of Marsilius of Padua, ed. C. W. Previté-
Orton (Cambridge UP, 1928), 7 (Dictio1, c. 2).
(^6) Constitutiones et Acta Publica Imperatorum et Regum, 1345–1348, 143–51; Corpus
Juris Canonici, Clementinarum, lib. II, t. xi (ii).
(^7) Friderici I Diplomata 1158–1167, 85. 41 , 93. 13 , 134. 5 , 146. 35 , 153. 16 , 308. 6 , 396. 28 ,
- 24 ; Friderici I Diplomata 1181–1190, 199. 35.
(^8) Constitutiones, 1273–98, 28. 5 , 50. 9 and 28 , 51, 52. 5.
(^9) Constitutiones, 1325–30, 347. 20 , 690. 35 , 719. 1 ; Constitutiones, 1345–48, 94. 10 ,
- 10 , and cf. 11. 20 , 27. 20 , 63. 20 , 64. 1 , 116. 10 , 215. 25 , 304. 10 , 310. 45 , 435. 20 , 509. 40 ,
- 25 , 703.1.
(^10) P. Brand, ‘The Age of Bracton’, in The History of English Law, ed. J. Hudson (Oxford
UP for the British Academy, 1996); J.-Ph. Genet, ‘Droit et histoire en Angleterre’, Annales de
Bretagne(1980).