Irreducible ambiguity? The line between custom and statute in the law-making of thirteenth-century Poland

Abstract

A resurging subject today is medieval customary law and its boundary with statute. Regarding Poland, the inquiry is complicated by a historiographical consensus that here the law essentially was customary, supplemented by statute only in the later fourteenth century. This certainty has reduced legal reality to unwarranted uniformity. In response, I survey the terminology related to custom and statute, examine one document bridging that terminology and an enactment resembling a statute, and place that enactment in a long earlier legacy of written rule-making. This is not a sharp transition from custom to statute, but an evolving sequence of written expression.