The Letter of the Law

Expressed through these writings, law was able to move far beyond those places where the oral culture had taken it. Now in a tangible form, law could travel the vast lengths of the Greek and Roman empires and the Carolingian and English kingdoms. ⁸⁵ Whereas the effectiveness of an oral command given from a distance depended upon its simplicity, writing facilitated the dissemination of extended, more complex legal commands. Similarly, the messages of the great treatise writers could be carried literally to entirely new domains, thereby spreading their authors' conceptions of law far beyond what would have been possible in oral times.

Furthermore, the method of enframing the law changed once law found itself in the hands of scribes, clerks, and monks who were armed with quills or metal styluses to write on parchment, wax tablets, or animal skins. ⁸⁶ "[W]riting 'lives' only posthumously and vicariously," ⁸⁷ Professor Ong reminds us; therefore, "writing leaves a fixed residue, as speech does not." ⁸⁸ Writing has the power to enframe the law in terms of stability and durability: Legal terms are particularized (made specific), concretized (made definite), and fossilized (made lasting). By enframing the law in fixed terms, writing limits the legal effects of oral memory's more fluid recollections.⁸⁹

Moreover, when law found a new home in penned texts, its field of reference became subject to new boundaries. The legal manuscript distanced the author from the word and then abstracted that word in the "letter of the law." In the chirographic age, the law increasingly extracted living reality from its "four corners." Form pointed inevitably towards formalism; systematization became more the rule. The very notion of treatises, like the chirographic treaties of Gratian, Glanvill, and Bracton, which organize and summarize huge masses of legal materials is anomalous in an oral culture. ⁹⁰ Similarly, the concept of law as a unified and orderly body of principles and procedures, which characterized the scholastic method of analysis in medieval legal education, ⁹¹ could not materialize without manuscripts. ⁹²

While scribal law struggled to move over both space and time, to fix its message, and to distance itself from reality, the manner in which it was preserved­the handwritten script­prevented it from completely overtaking oral communication in the various affairs of the law. With only a few copies available for a widely dispersed population, chirographic writing alone could not reach many of the subjects of the realm. Given the time, labor, and expense of copying legislation and royal orders, chirographic law alone could not efficiently reproduce and fix is message. Furthermore, until more than a limited class of people could read and write, chirographic law alone could not abstract reality for the collective mind. In short, the scribal age could commence, but not complete such transformations in the law­this could only come later in the age of print. Yet "the important point is not the degree to which writing penetrated oral culture: it was its irrevocability." ⁹³