MEDIEVAL CHURCH COURT: FORMATION OF THE PROFESSIONAL ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of the formation of the professional environment of medieval church courts in Western Europe. It was established that until the 13th century, lawyers who worked in church courts were "proto-professionals": there was no orderly and systematic management of cases, there was a lack of qualified judicial personnel, generally accepted standards of professional ethics and formal control over admission to judicial practice. It is noted that with the growth of the role of the papacy in the Church and the Christian world, the spread of universities, the reception of Roman law and the establishment of the system of canon law, the judicial power of the church expands and the organizational design of medieval church proceedings takes place: a clear hierarchy of church courts is built; church hierarchs begin to delegate judicial powers to professional lawyers – officials. Attention was drawn to the fact that due to the development of canonical procedural law and the complication of procedural technical details, there was an urgent need to form a professional group of legal experts. It is analyzed how the activity of church judges began to take the form of a hierarchically organized corporation with a conscious professional self-identification. The author considers it indisputable that no "national" state of that time had such an extensive network of courts that would overlap the legal field of the entire medieval Europe. It was concluded that the organization, judicial procedures and recording of the decisions of the medieval church courts became an example for the contemporary secular judicial institutions.