252 Raoul C. van Caenegem

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Zitiervorschlag: Rechtsgeschichte Rg 17 (2010)

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R. C. van Caenegem

Legal historians I have known: a personal memoir

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Legal historians I have known:a personal memoirIntroduction. It is not my purpose here to

present and discuss the achievements of someoutstanding twentieth-century legal historianswhom I have personally known and who havedeparted from this life, but to offer some mem-ories of their character and personal idiosyncra-sies: human beings as well as eminent scholars.

I am well aware that their opera are moreimportant than the anecdotes I am telling here.Nevertheless, it is normal for posterity to wonderwhat the celebrities were like in everyday life. Itmay be argued that knowing about JohannesBrahms’s not so reputable private life is irrele-vant when admiring his sublime Deutsches Re-quiem, just as Anton Bruckner’s uneventful ex-istence as a devout organist tells us nothingabout his passionate Fourth Symphony, but westill want to read their biographies and find outwhat sort of people they were. Equally, I pre-sume that the reader will be happy to see thelegal historians whom he has only knownthrough reading their learned books come tolife. What was the Ganshof of Qu’est-ce que laféodalité like in every-day life, or the Ullmann ofLucas de Penna? Personal memories concernanecdotes rather than events. According to theNew Shorter Oxford English Dictionary onHistorical Principles an anecdote is »a narrativeof an amusing or striking incident«, to which theDictionary adds rather deprecatingly »orig. anitem of gossip«. An event, on the contrary, issomething serious, i. e. an occurrence »that issignificant or noteworthy«. This being said, Ihope that the reader will find at least some of myanecdotes noteworthy and that he will agreewith the words of Professor Laurent Waelkens:

»Quel plaisir de se retrouver parmi les savants dela génération précédente«.1

Helmut Coing (1912–2000), eminent legalhistorian and professor. After law studies atvarious universities Coing became doctor iurisin Göttingen in 1935 under Wolfgang Kunkeland obtained his habilitation in Frankfurt in1938 under Erich Genzmer, whose assistant hewas. His thesis, on the Rezeption in Frankfurt,was published the following year. In 1940 hebecame professor extraordinarius of Roman andGerman civil law in Frankfurt. After service inthe German army he was, in 1948, appointedordinary professor of Roman and German civillaw and legal philosophy in Frankfurt, where hestayed till the end of his career, having beenrector from 1955 till 1957. In 1964 he foundedthe Frankfurt Max-Planck-Institut für europäi-sche Rechtsgeschichte, whose director he was till1980. The Institute, with its large staff andadmirable library, its periodical and its series ofmonographs, is till this day the mecca for allEuropean legal historians.

Coing’s learned writings were as extensiveas they were varied. Although he worked also oncontemporary German law and on legal philo-sophy, I shall limit myself here to his activitiesas a legal historian. His personal contributionsconcerned the role of Roman law in medievalEurope, with a voluminous fascicule in Genz-mer’s Ius Romanum Medii Aevi and with studieson the »reception« of the ius commune in latemedieval and modern Germany.

After his retirement, when he was in hisseventies, he had the time to publish his Euro-

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1 Reviewing H. Hetzenecker,Stephan Kuttner in America1940–64, Berlin 2007, in: TheLegal History Review 76 (2008)468.

päisches Privatrecht in two volumes. Volume I,devoted to the ius commune and the usus mo-dernus between 1500 and 1800, is of particularimportance as it is one of the rare works whereone finds the contents of this important Euro-pean system of learned law, as opposed to itsmore common external history. Here we findanalysed, in priceless detail, the law on personsand family, property, obligations, commerce andinheritance. Vol. II is devoted to the nineteenth-century development in the countries that usedto belong to the area of the ius commune.2 Al-though Coing was primarily at home in the landsof the civil law, he was very knowledgeableabout the history of the English common law.He spent a year in Oxford as visiting fellow ofAll Souls College and directed, with K. W. Nörr,a series of comparative studies devoted to thehistory of Anglo-American and European con-tinental law, which can boast of some twentyvolumes.3

Coing’s most impressive contribution is nodoubt his editorship of the encyclopaedic »text-book« on the sources and literature on Europeanprivate law from the Middle Ages to the endof the nineteenth century. It is a vast collectivework, mostly written by collaborators of Coing’sMax-Planck-Institute and devoted to jurispru-dence, case law and legislation.4 This ambitiousenterprise is still incomplete, and its counterpart,to be devoted to public law, never materialized.Coing usually wrote for a learned readership,but he did not shun haute vulgarisation. HisEpochen der Rechtsgeschichte in Deutschlandof 1967, based on a series of radio talks andwritten in an elegant and limpid style, reached awide public, which was not otherwise acquain-ted with either law or history. Coing lectured andwrote on law as an element of European civili-zation.5 His immense merits were internation-

ally recognised so that numerous membershipsof academies, honorary degrees and a Festschriftcame his way.6

I have met Coing on many occasions, interalia, at the meetings of the WissenschaftlicheBeirat of his Institute. I also, by sheer good luck,spent a few weeks with him at the Villa Linda inFiesole, when we were both lecturing at theIstituto Universitario Europeo. We spent severalcosy evenings talking and discussing. He wasmore relaxed there than at his Institute, wherehe was responsible for so many activities. It wasat the Villa Linda that he told me about hiscollaboration with Professor Walter Hallstein,who had been rector of Coing’s university from1946 to 1948, before entering German andEuropean politics. Hallstein was president ofthe European Commission from 1958 till 1967.Coing told me with some sadness about Hall-stein’s bold plans for a full-scale European Uni-versity in Florence, which were scaled down tothe Institute at the Badia.

Helmut Coing was a tall, elegant man, withan engaging smile, even if his bearing could havesomething military – possibly because of thegenes of his Huguenot ancestors who were offi-cers: his own father was killed as an officer in theFirst World War. There were, however, legalgenes at work also, for Coing’s paternal grand-father had been President of the Senate at theOberlandesgericht in Celle, in northern Ger-many (and an honorary doctor of Göttingen).Coing was that rare figure, an administrativegenius, running his Institute and its numerousendeavours, combined with a creative and pro-found scholar and writer.

Coing clearly was an Establishment figure,who had connections with German industrialistsand their foundations, which supported scho-larly enterprises. He even became chancellor of

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2 Europäisches Privatrecht 1500 bis1800, I: Älteres Gemeines Recht,II: Europäisches Privatrecht 1600bis 1914, 19. Jahrhundert, Mu-nich 1985–89, 665 and 678 pp.

3 Comparative Studies in Continen-tal and Anglo-American legalhistory, Berlin 1985 ff.

4 H. Coing (ed.), Handbuch derQuellen und Literatur der neuereneuropäischen Privatrechtsge-schichte, I, Munich 1973 ff. Vol. I

contains a Presentation of the ge-neral plan by Coing. It is note-worthy that vol. III, 2 (1982)concerns legislation, inter alia, innineteenth-century England andRussia.

5 See: Recht als Element der euro-päischen Kultur, in: HistorischeZeitschrift 238 (1984) 1–15.

6 N. Horn (ed.), EuropäischesRechtsdenken in Geschichte undGegenwart. Festschrift für Helmut

Coing zum 70. Geburtstag, 2 vols.,Munich 1982. There also was, inthe same year, a Festgabe, as Son-derheft 17 of Ius Commune.

the Ordre pour le Mérite, Germany’s highestdistinction. Yet, he wore his eminent status verylightly and was an amusing, down to earthconversationalist. I found it typical that he didnot himself chair the meetings of the Beirat in hisInstitute, but invited a foreign member – Profes-sor Robert Feenstra – to lead the discussions.When the honorary degrees began to come hisway, he at first added in his letters the formulaDr. iur. h. c. to his usual Professor Dr. iur., butwith the second honorary degree this becameDr. iur. h. c. (bis), and then Dr. iur. h. c. (ter).However, when numbers four, five and sixturned up, he signed Dr. iur. h. c. (multotiens),which amused his friends and no doubt himself.

His contact with Ghent had come about inan unexpected way. In the spring of 1945 he wasdefending his fatherland on the Rhine, while hisGhent colleague, F. L. Ganshof, was advancingwith the allied forces and so it came about that –as they later discovered – they had been shellingeach other from across the river – fortunatelywithout dire consequences.

Like many of my heroes, Coing came fromthe law to history, but unlike them, he remaineda fully-fledged lawyer, who followed and com-mented on the norms and doctrines of his owntime.7

René Dekkers (1909–1976) was an out-standing civilist, Romanist and legal historian.He was appointed ordinary professor at the Uni-versity of Brussels in 1941 and in 1946 at theUniversity of Ghent, where in 1949 he was deanof the Faculty of Letters (to which he initiallybelonged) and dean of the Law Faculty in 1958–59 and 1965–66. From 1966 till 1970 he alsowas rector of the University of Elizabethville(Lubumbashi) in the Belgian Congo. Dekkers’sscholarly work led, inter alia, to his election to

the Royal Flemish Academy of Sciences and Artsin 1948 and an honorary degree in Groningenin 1969. Although to the legal profession he wasmainly known as a civilist – author of funda-mental textbooks on Belgian civil law – he wasalso an outstanding Romanist and legal histor-ian. In 1938 he published a book on legalhumanism in the Low Countries, in 1951 hisBibliotheca belgica juridica and in 1953 hisDroit privé des peuples, a brief outline of worldlegal history.8 His course on Roman Law, whichI attended in 1947, was more a history than ananalysis of Roman doctrine.

Dekkers worked hard and with regularity.In one of my oldest recollections I see him arriv-ing early every morning at the medieval Seminarin order to compile the aforementioned Biblio-theca. He sat down by the reference works andcopied relentlessly the necessary biographicaldata for his overview of the jurisprudence ofthe Low Countries from the earliest times to1800. Dekkers’s lessons were clear and method-ical and he welcomed questions. I have a specialmemory of his optional class for the last-yearstudents, where we (i. e. Jules Dhaenens whobecame a judge in the Court of Cassation andmyself) read Justinian’s Digest in a lively ex-change of ideas and suggestions for translations.

As a person René Dekkers was perceived byhis students as severe and even stern, but outsidethe class-room he was most friendly: I warmlyremember the lunch he gave for my wife andmyself on my appointment at the University. Healso sent me, a few days before my marriage, acharming letter about »life in a family whichkeeps mind and heart young and fresh, which iseveryone’s vocation« (12 August 1954). Dekkersloved his independence; he came from a prosper-ous Antwerp family and married a rich woman –a happy union full of (cello) music. He was not

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7 See the In Memoriam by KlausLuig in Savigny Zeitschrift fürRechtsgeschichte, R. A. 119(2002) 662–678. For bibliogra-phies see the one in the aforemen-tioned Festschrift of 1982, II, 605–34. See also Max-Planck-Institutfür europäische RechtsgeschichteFrankfurt am Main. Gesamtver-zeichnis der Veröffentlichungen,Frankfurt (1996), 73–91 and theList at https://portal.d-nb.de/

opac.htm?method, from the Ka-talog der Deutschen Nationalbib-liothek.

8 See the bibliography in Hommageà René Dekkers, Brussels 1982,5–19.

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easily moved: I remember intervening as hiscolleague in favour of a student who had missedan appointment, but the professor refused toaccept the boy’s excuses. In appearance Dekkerswas upright, slim and elegant, a sportsman whoplayed football in the team of his Faculty andalways looked fit and young.

The learned man took a lively interest inideology – he taught legal philosophy in Ghent –and particularly in the great political currents ofhis time. A professor in the Freethinkers’ Uni-versity of Brussels, his sympathy inclined to theleft which, by the way, cost him the rectorship ofGhent University. Indeed, although he was thefirst candidate on the list submitted by theteaching staff, the minister (this was at the timewhen the government in Brussels appointed pro-fessors and rectors in Ghent) preferred professorAlbert Kluyskens, the second candidate, whobelonged to the minister’s own Christian-demo-cratic party (and was also an eminent civilist).

Students and colleagues suspected Dekkershad Marxist sympathies, and it is a fact that inhis fifties he developed an admiration for whatwas then called socialist law and for the SovietUnion in particular. He even learnt Russian andtranslated Russian legal texts for the benefit ofWestern lawyers. But after a few years his love ofthe Soviets cooled down and he found a newtarget for his enthusiasm in communist China.He praised that country’s traditional love ofjustice and aversion to law courts and legalprocedure. He visited China and reported dailyto his wife: his communications were publishedin 1956 in his still very readable Lettres deChine. These ideological vagaries puzzled stu-dents and professors alike. Was Dekkers a naiveliberal fellow-traveller? Many found him anamazing and even unfathomable person. Thisimpression was heightened by some personal

idiosyncrasies. When lecturing in the classroomsof the Legal History Seminar he always orderedevery single window to be wide open, so that inmid-winter the secretary fled with her typewriterto a warm abode. He also puzzled students andstaff by his need for reflection which caused himto lie on the floor of the Seminar in order tomeditate.

François Louis Ganshof (1895–1980), emi-nent legal historian, medievalist and professor.Studied History and Law in Ghent, where heheard Henri Pirenne as a first-year student in1913–14. Doctor in History in 1921 and in Lawin 1922, he started teaching in Ghent in 1923,becoming Ordinary Professor in 1932 in theFaculty of Letters, dean of which he was in1937–38. He taught, until his retirement in1961, a variety of courses on general medievaland Byzantine history and on legal history inthe Faculty of Letters and also, succeeding therenowned civilist A. Kluyskens, from 1955 on-wards in the Faculty of Law, where he gave acompulsory course on the history of civil law.

Ganshof held no posts outside the worldof scholarship, except as attaché of the Belgiandelegation at the Peace Conference of Paris, as anexpert in historical geography, and service asofficer in the Belgian army during the two WorldWars.

Right from the start Ganshof published de-tailed studies on various aspects of medieval law.There was a continuous stream of articles andbooks, such as on the ministeriales in Lotharin-gia of 1926 and his Tribunaux de Châtellenie of1932. Many concerned particular elements offeudal law or Carolingian legislation, leading upto his Qu’est-ce que la féodalité of 1944 and hisRecherches sur les capitulaires of 1958 (originalDutch version 1955). Meanwhile he published

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path-breaking work on the history of medievalFlanders and its institutions. The general historyof the period was presented in 1953 in a book inthe series Histoire des relations internationalesdirected by Pierre Renouvin, and his researchon town history resulted in 1941 in a book onurban development between Loire and Rhine.His numerous articles on the Frankish realm,and especially on Charlemagne, belonged mainlyto the years after the Second World War.

Notwithstanding these learned and widelyacclaimed books and articles, the picture is notone of undivided success. Indeed, in the 1950sand 1960s the world of scholarship was eagerlywaiting for two great syntheses, but unfortu-nately in vain. Ganshof was preparing a bookon the institutions of the Western Middle Ages,based on many years of teaching. Its publicationin Dutch by the renowned Standaard Boekhan-del of Antwerp was even announced in the presscausing real excitement. An English version wason the way thanks to Geoffrey Barraclough towhom Ganshof had sent his text and who in1948 approached Blackwell in Oxford, but atthe last moment Ganshof felt that the book wasstill not ripe for publication, so that neither theDutch nor the English version materialized. Theother book that never was, concerned the longexpected biography of Charlemagne. NumerousVorarbeiten prepared the way – and even thebook on the capitularies could be seen as one –but when the moment of writing and publishingthe magnum opus arrived, Ganshof hesitated,recoiled and finally gave up. I remember himtelling me sadly that he had waited too long andhad grown too old to accomplish the dauntingtask, i. e. an authoritative biography of the paterEuropae, the first great European since the fallof Rome to enter world history, who ruled forforty-six years from 768 to 814 over what is now

France, western Germany, the Benelux countries,Switzerland, most of Italy and part of Spain. In aletter of 1965 Ganshof wrote to his Americanfriend, Bryce Lyon: »If I am not able (and I fear Iwill not be able) to write the book I alwayswanted to write on the subject [i. e. the life ofCharlemagne], I shall have given the essentialfeatures about the subject«. He referred to hischapters in Karl der Grosse. Lebenswerk undNachleben, edited by H. Beumann (I, Düsseldorf1965), which Bryce and Mary Lyon translated.He should have heeded the advice of the Oxfordmedievalist H. E. Salter, whom he quoted himselfin the Preface to the book on the capitulaires:»Those who are long passed middle age shouldprint their material, if it can be of use to others,and not wait to make it more perfect«.

When Ganshof wrote to Bryce Lyon he wasseventy, so maybe he had waited too long inorder »to make his work more perfect«. He wasa perfectionist who was not satisfied until he hadstudied every aspect, but when would that pointbe reached? How perfectionist he was was re-vealed when he wrote to me in the early 1950sthat he had destroyed the first text of his con-tribution to F. Lot and R. Fawtier’s Institutionsfrançaises au Moyen Age because, on rereading,he found it not up to his usual standard. So herewrote the whole eighty-three pages ab ovo.They were published in 1957 in vol. I of theseries, which was called Institutions seigneur-iales, a title to which Ganshof rightly objected,because Flanders, Normandy and the otherFrench provinces were principalities and notseigniories.

Another explanation why Charlemagne nev-er was written, besides advanced age, might bethe learned man’s preference for detailed indepth research close to the safety of the sourcesrather than imaginative wide-sweeping construc-

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tions. Whatever the reason, Ganshof’s disap-pointment was history’s loss, for one may doubtthat another érudit of his calibre will appear towrite the great book. Ganshof never wrote aboutmethodology and was averse to theory andsociology. Philosophy was alien to him. I remem-ber him referring to his colleagues in the Phi-losophy department, whose offices were aboveours: »There sit the philosophers, dreaming andmusing, like spiders which get the stuff of theirwebs out of their own bellies«: his material wasthe facts, as could be ascertained from trust-worthy charters and chronicles.

Professor Ganshof’s achievements werewidely recognized. He lectured in many coun-tries and belonged to numerous academies andother learned bodies, inter alia, from 1939 on-wards the Royal Flemish Academy of Sciencesin Brussels and, from 1932, of the Royal Com-mission on Ancient Laws, also in Brussels (hewas its president from 1953 to 1968). He re-ceived thirteen honorary degrees, three Britishand ten French, the latter in a steady stream fromMontpellier in 1936 to Algiers in 1959. Therewas a real outburst in the one year 1953 – Lille,Paris and Strasbourg – followed by doctorates in1955, 1957, 1958 and 1959 – four in five years!

The learned man steadfastly refused a classicFestschrift: he could not be budged on thatpoint, as generally speaking he was not inclinedto change his mind. When I suggested to him acollection of his articles, published in numerous– sometimes unlikely – places, he asked for aweek’s time to consider. But here again theanswer was negative and the motivation: »I donot want articles of mine to be reprinted un-changed and not brought up to date, becausethey have been overtaken by recent research, andI do not have the time to revise them as thor-oughly as would be required«.

Nevertheless two volumes of collected ar-ticles were published. In 1968 three studies onCarolingian institutions appeared in an Englishtranslation by Bryce and Mary Lyon under thetitle Frankish Institutions under Charlemagne.And in 1971 a collection of sixteen articles cameout, again in an English translation, by JanetSondheimer and without revision, under the titleThe Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy.Also, following a well established tradition, sixmembers of the Editorial Committee of the LegalHistory Review dedicated in 1963 a collection ofarticles to their illustrious fellow member.

I have known Professor Ganshof for manyyears, as a student from 1946, and later as hisassistant and colleague. After his retirement Isometimes saw him at his home in Brussels,where he sat in his office on the first floor,surrounded by books and periodicals that keptarriving but which his poor eyesight made themvery difficult to read.

Ganshof was an inspiring teacher who ex-pressed himself clearly and forcefully. He had animposing physique. Female students were scaredof him, but he had a warm character: when oneof his students apologized for missing a classbecause her grandmother had died, he condoledwith her in heartfelt terms and told her that heknew by experience how distressing the loss of abeloved grandma was.

Ganshof belonged to a well-to-do family ofbankers, international merchants and barristersfrom Bruges, where he was born. His paternalgrandfather, François Ganshof, came from Wer-den and was married to Wilhelmina Birken,from Krefeld (both in the Rhineland). Grand-father François was in banking and importedwood, mainly from Russia. His son Arthur,Ganshof’s father (1867–1929), was a barrister,first in Bruges and from 1921 onwards in Brus-

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sels. François Louis Ganshof’s maternal grand-father was the barrister August Van der Meersch,who wrote on Flemish history and inspired hisgrandson’s love of Flanders and its past.

Ganshof was attached to the place of hisbirth. One day in the medieval seminar heshowed me with indignation the page in a newvolume of the Monumenta Germaniae Historicawhere he was thanked for his advice on Flemishchronicles and referred to as Franciscus Ludovi-cus Ganshof Bruxellensis, instead of Brugensis,which he truly was. He also wanted to be buriedin Bruges, but because of various circumstanceshe was laid to rest in Brussels.

Professor Ganshof had a good rapport withseveral German medievalists and published someof his work in German. He was, however, wor-ried by the rise of national socialism: he hap-pened to be staying in Berlin in 1933 and saw thefrightening spectacle of the march of the torchbearing brownshirts on 30 January. In 1937 hewas in Göttingen for the celebration of the two-hundred year existence of the University andtalked to Magda Goebbels, who, to Ganshof’ssurprise, spoke good French, as she had been toa finishing school in Brussels. In the summer of1940 Franz Petri, a medievalist from Bonn, cameto see Ganshof at the Faculty in Ghent in orderto explain that the German army had come toliberate Belgium, but Ganshof made it clear to hiscolleague that he was completely on the wrongtrack. A few years later, as Ganshof told mehimself, he had late in the evening an unexpectedvisitor: his younger brother, Walter Ganshof vander Meersch (1900–1993), a distinguished law-yer, had come to say goodbye, as he was aboutto leave the country illegally in order to join theBelgian government in exile in London.

Some of Ganshof’s courses were given excathedra to hundreds of students, but even in

seminars with two or three students he spokeapodictically: there was no desultory chatting,and we were there to listen to the professor’svoice. He, to be sure, did pose questions, but theright answer was already on his pile of slips, andhe could be taken aback when some unexpectedtranslation or interpretation was offered. Thoseseminars were devoted to close reading of thesources such as Einhard’s Vita Karoli, a pains-taking business advancing at the slow pace ofone phrase per lesson.

A Ganshof seminar could be a chasteningexperience. I can still hear his powerful voicetelling a student who made a somewhat fancifultranslation: »Dat staat er niet, meneer« (i. e. thatis not what the text says). But even to hiscolleagues he could be overpowering. One daya medievalist from Paris was giving a guestlecture in Ghent in the small room of the medi-eval seminar and offering an interpretation of aLatin text with which Ganshof disagreed. So, infront of the students, the two scholars engaged ina technical discussion which only ended whenGanshof produced Du Cange’s dictionary andproved his case. I should add that afterwardsGanshof confessed to me that he was sorry forreacting as he did on the spur of the moment.

To younger colleagues he could occasionallygive some blunt advice. When Professor RobertBoutruche, a specialist of medieval feudalism,had been appointed in Paris and asked his oldercolleague from Ghent, addressing him as »chermaître«, what advice he had for him, the briefreply was: »Apprenez l’allemand monsieur, ap-prenez l’allemand«.

At a conference in Paris, Professor Jean-François Lemarignier gave a paper on someaspects of Charlemagne’s reign and, venturinginto the realm of hypotheses, he imprudentlyasked Ganshof, sitting on the front row, what

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he thought of them; the straightforward answerwas – predictably – »Il n’y a pas de texte«. Andeven when the speaker tried to defend the legiti-macy of a reasonable assumption, the answerwas an immutable: »Il n’y a pas de texte« – sowhat was the use of fantasizing?

The international conferences of Spoleto onthe early Middle Ages were the occasion forlively exchanges. A German scholar who main-tained that no exemplar of a particular type ofFrankish weaponry survived was told that onewas on display in a particular room of a partic-ular museum. At Spoleto Ganshof also got in-volved in a lively discussion with another author-ity on feudalism, Professor Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz, resulting in an intellectual fireworkwhich was relished by the congressists andtalked about for years afterwards.

Ganshof’s encyclopaedic knowledge couldbe upsetting to guides who took tourists around.On one occasion in a church in southern France,the warden pointed at a tomb as being that ofCount Raymond V, but Ganshof corrected him:it was Raymond VI. And when the guide, takenaback, said: »Vous en savez long, monsieur«, theProfessor simply replied: »C’est mon métier«.

Ganshof was always ready to help col-leagues without any fuss. He read the manu-script of Bryce Lyon’s biography of Pirenne andsent him chapter by chapter his appreciation,corrections and suggestions. He did the same formy own edition of the sentences of the Parlementof Paris on Flemish appeals, going carefullythrough the Latin texts and the French summa-ries.

Ganshof was extremely polite in an old-worldly fashion that astounded his younger col-leagues: his congratulations or words of thankswent on forever and it was embarrassing to putan end to them. He even sent me a postcard

announcing that he was going to ring me up:calling somebody at home without any warningwas a breach of privacy. Another relic from abygone age was Ganshof’s notion of the status ofa University professor. When he was invited tolecture at Berkeley and needed an American visa,he was told that he had to undergo a medicalexamination. This he at first refused because itwas beneath the dignity of a professor and heonly gave in after learning that the same ruleapplied to American scholars visiting Europe.

Ganshof’s knowledge of Latin was pro-found and he expected the same of his students,in the days that Latin was required to enterUniversity. So he was shattered, as I remembervividly, when his first-year students could notexplain offhand what the Kalendae, Nonae andIdus were.

He loved order and punctuality, in himselfand in others. So, when on a Sunday morning (!),the Royal Library in Brussels opened five mi-nutes late or when the train from Brussels toGhent left with a two minutes delay, letters ofprotest were the prompt result.

Ganshof was a very serious person, whoseambition it was to teach his students, not toamuse them. Yet, he was an entertaining con-versationalist and not averse to a good joke. Onone occasion, however, this misfired and led tosome embarrassment. When he was about toreceive an honorary degree in London, he wastold that his insignia would be given him by theQueen Mother, whose hand he was expected tokiss. So when he arrived in London and theimmigration officer asked him what the reasonof his visit was, he replied he had come to kiss theQueen Mother’s hand. The dumbfounded officerdid not know what to make of this: was thisforeigner – horresco referens – trying to ridiculethe monarchy? Could he let this strange indivi-

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dual enter the United Kingdom? He consultedhis superior who fortunately understood whatwas going on, welcomed Ganshof and congratu-lated him on the honour he was about to receive.

The learned man enjoyed great prestige inhis own University. Quite often, at the end of alengthy disorderly Faculty meeting he produceda suitable draft letter or note, which was greetedwith relief all round. He played a lively part inthe elections of candidates for the rectorship ofthe University.

Professor Ganshof found a life-long supportin his wife Nell, née Kirkpatrick. Although shewas a small woman, without her husband’simposing physique, she had a strong characterand her own pronounced views and judgment.This was particularly manifest in religious mat-ters, where the spouses were at loggerheads. Theirony was that Ganshof, who traditionally grewup as a Catholic, became an active and devotedProtestant, whereas his wife, descending from aScottish Calvinist family, became an equallyactive and devoted Catholic. This state of affairscould cause ripples and caustic remarks. Oneday the two went to a funeral in a church inVeurne, where the congregation were noisilytalking and greeting each other. So when thelearned man remarked on this undisciplinedbehaviour in a place of worship, his wife repliedthat their deportment was only natural becausethey felt happy and at home in their own familiarchurch. On another occasion Mrs. Ganshof wasquite amused. In June 1962 her husband wasgiven an honorary degree in the Senate House inCambridge at a ceremony where I was present,and the Orator made a speech in Latin aboutGanshof’s eminence. All went well along pre-dictable lines until we suddenly heard the Oratorcall the new doctor an Ecclesiae Romanae filiumfidelem. Philip Grierson, an old family friend

who was sitting by me, was shocked by thisgaffe, but Mrs. Ganshof was smiling broadly,possibly thinking that that was what her hus-band ought to have remained. Afterwards, at agarden party in Trinity College, the archbishopof York, Dr. Coggan, who had just received anhonorary degree in Divinity, upon being told ofthis mishap ordered new copies of the Speechesto be printed, omitting the offending misinfor-mation. I imagine that those two versions wouldbe labelled rarissimes by the book-trade.

Books waiting to be read or written by thelearned man were Mrs. Ganshof’s lifelong rivals.What she was up against was revealed early on,during their honeymoon in Venice, where heryoung scholar husband discovered a bookshopfull of reasonably priced volumes of the Mon-umenta Germaniae Historica. Ganshof foundthem irresistible, purchased a good supply andwas so keen to read and place them in his homelibrary that the visit of the city of the doges wascut short. Many years later, when Mrs. Ganshoftold my wife this anecdote, the trauma wasclearly not yet healed. It must, however, havebeen a consolation to her that her patienceallowed her husband to achieve the tasks forwhich his innumerable pupils and scholars inmany lands were truly thankful. No one whomet Professor Ganshof will ever forget his force-ful personality or fail to admire his exceptionalachievements.9

Jean Gaudemet (1908–2001) was an emi-nent legal historian who taught in Grenoble,Strasbourg and Paris after becoming a licentiatein Letters and Law in Strasbourg and obtaining adoctorate in Law in Paris in 1934. In Paris hetaught from 1950 till 1978.

His immense oeuvre covered Roman, canonand secular law from Antiquity to his own day.

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9 See the In Memoriams by R. C.van Caenegem in: Jaarboek1980. Koninklijke Academie voorWetenschappen, Letteren enSchone Kunsten van België 241–251 (with a bibliography 248–251) (English translation in R. C.van Caenegem, Law, History, theLow Countries and Europe, ed. byL. Milis et al., London and RioGrande 1994, 179–89), by C. VanDe Kieft in: Jarboek van de Ko-

ninklijke Nederlandse Akademievan Wetenschappen, Amsterdam1980, 1–5, by R. C. van Caene-gem in: The Legal History Review49 (1981) 5–12, by A. R. Lewis,R. S. Lopez and B. Lyon in: Spe-culum 56 (1981) 195–196, byL. Milis in: Belgisch Tijdschriftvoor Filologie en Geschiedenis 59(1981) 518–528 and by J. Gilis-sen in: Handelingen van de Ko-ninklijke Commissie voor de

Uitgave der Oude Wetten en Ver-ordeningen van België 30 (1982)V–VIII. See also the articles onGanshof by R. C. van Caenegemin: Nationaal Biographisch Woor-denboek 12, Brussels 1987, col.263–73 and by A. Verhulst in:Nouvelle Biographie Nationale 5,Brussels 1999, 171–174. See alsothe evaluation of Ganshof’s workby D. Heirbaut and A. Masfer-rer in: J. Aurell and F. Crosas

His Institutions de l’Antiquité (1967) is an out-standing textbook, not only on Greece andRome, but also on Egypt and Mesopotamiaand Hebrew law. It contains chronological ta-bles, an index rerum and a list of legal andnarrative sources. The Preface explains that theauthor decided to publish his manuel »en pen-sant aux étudiants«, but one wonders whatstudent was expected to manage this »hand-book« of 990 pages! In his special field of canonlaw Gaudemet wrote the authoritative L’églisedans l’empire romain (IVe–Ve siècles) (1958), theHistoire du droit canonique (1994), from theearliest times to the codes of 1983 and 1990, anda reference work on Les sources du droit canon-ique (VIIIe–XXe siècle) (1993).

Gaudemet, author of heavy erudite tomes,could also present complex problems in short,lucid articles. I refer, for example, to his Quel-ques opinions des docteurs médiévaux sur le rôledu peuple dans le gouvernement (1991), wherehe refers to Roman, canon and customary law,but also to theology and philosophy as well asthe experience of the Italian city-states.

Gaudemet’s interest in the problems of hisown time became manifest when he joined thePontifical Commission for the revision of thecode of canon law and the code of the orientalChurches (1969–1980) and succeeded GabrielLe Bras as Counsellor for Religious Affairs at theQuai d’Orsay.

He naturally was a member or president ofnumerous learned bodies, inter alia of the RoyalFlemish Academy in Brussels and received manyhonorary degrees, stretching from Cracow in1964 to La Sapienza and the Pontifical Univer-sity in Rome in 1992 and 2000.

Jean Gaudemet was lucky in many ways.He descended from a Burgundian family of Uni-versity professors – a tradition continued by his

own offspring. He was very tall, elegant andupright and enjoyed excellent health well intohis old age. Even at this late stage he thoughtnothing of an eye operation, which he jokinglytalked about as if he had been to a tea party.Few scholars are lucky enough to be offered aFestschrift on their ninetieth birthday, aptly en-titled Nonagesimo anno.10

Nevertheless, the learned man received hisshare of »the slings and arrows of outrageousfortune«. In 1940, when he had been happilyteaching in Strasbourg for three years – andmarried for two years – disaster struck, whenhe was made a prisoner of war and spent fiveyears in an Oflag. In the meantime, Alsacehaving become German again, his Universitywas germanized and he lost his house and hislibrary. After his return, as he told me himself, hewould find some of his books in local second-hand bookshops. Gaudemet himself recoveredfrom those shocks thanks to his courage andstamina, but his wife had suffered a lastingtrauma.

I met Jean Gaudemet on numerous occa-sions and we became real friends. Each time anew book came out, he sent me a copy with theinscription »A mon collègue et ami Van Caene-gem en très cordial hommage«. I felt thankful formy good luck in knowing this distinguishedscholar so well. I first met him at the CanonLaw Conference at Boston in 1963. His friendlymanner and ad rem interventions made a greatimpression on everyone. It was, if an anecdote isallowed here, on that occasion that ProfessorLuigi Prosdocimi, the well known editor ofmedieval canon-law books (Huguccio!), madea lapsus that caused a (rare) moment of mirth.He had written his lecture on Gratian’s Duo suntgenera Christianorum in Italian, but StephanKuttner told him that too few participants under-

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(eds.), Rewriting the Middle Agesin the Twentieth Century, Turn-hout 2005, 223–241 (with a bib-liography). A more personal noteis struck in R. C. van Caenegem,F. L. Ganshof: persoonlijke herin-neringen, in: Tijdschrift voor Ge-schiedenis 119 (2006) 616–619and in B. Lyon (†), François LouisGanshof: Medieval Historian andFriend, in: Handelingen van deKoninklijke Commissie voor Ge-

schiedenis, 173 (2007) 5–14. In1946 Ganshof himself published adetailed list entitled Bibliographiedes Travaux Historiques de Fran-çois L. Ganshof, following a sys-tematic order.

10 C. Bontems (ed.), Nonagesimoanno. Mélanges en hommage àJean Gaudemet, Paris 1999, con-taining Eléments bibliographiques,13–20. An earlier bibliographyappeared in his Etudes de droit

romain of 1979, IX–XXVIII. For adetailed presentation, see J. Me-leze-Modrzejewski’s In Memo-riam in: Revue historique de droitfrançais et étranger 79 (2002) fasc.4, III–X. A posthumous collectionof Gaudemet’s articles, publishedin Strasbourg in 2008 under thetitle Formation du droit canoniqueet gouvernement de l’Eglise de l’an-tiquité à l’âge classique, contains a

stood Italian, so that French would be morehelpful. Prosdocimi had no time to rewrite histext and gave a running French translation fromhis Italian script. All went well till he reached thepassage where Gratian explains that the righthalf of the body of the Church is the clergy andthe left part the laity. His Italian »la parte sinistrasono I laici« became not »la partie gauche«, but»la partie sinistre de l’Eglise sont les laïcs«,causing a (subdued) ripple of amusement.

I also met Gaudemet regularly at the con-gresses and directors’ meetings of the SociétéJean Bodin, whose president he was. We alsomet at Frankfurt where we both were membersof the Wissenschaftliche Beirat of the Max-Planck-Institute: his interventions were listenedto with great interest and concerned French andEuropean law in a wide variety of periods. Andwhile he was writing his fundamental Le ma-riage en Occident, which came out in 1987, helectured for the Law students in Ghent at myinvitation on the error in persona in canon lawand the role of Roman law in the elaboration ofthe ecclesiastical doctrine. The lecture was sowell presented and so well structured that hisyoung audience liked it very much. On thatoccasion we had dinner in our home, where thelearned man was full of stories about his belovedBurgundy and Alsace and their wines.

Erich Genzmer (1893–1970), UniversityProfessor and eminent specialist of medievalRoman law, was, like so many of my heroes, alawyer turned historian. Genzmer, whose fatherwas a judge in the Prussian administrativecourts, studied Law in Berlin from 1912 to1914, after two semesters in Lausanne. He spentsome time as a civil servant, and entered hisacademic career in 1919, when he became theassistant of Professor Seckel in Berlin, who

turned his attention to the medieval leges, the»second life of Roman law«. In 1921 Genzmerobtained his doctorate and the following yearhis habilitation. He almost immediately startedteaching Roman law in Königsberg, where in1934 he was promoted to ordinary professor.The following year he moved to Frankfurt,where he (in the Nazi-era) belonged to the liberalwing of the teaching staff. In 1940 he went toHamburg, where he taught till his retirement(in Frankfurt as well as in Hamburg he was deanof the Faculty). The academic year 1937–38 hespent as guest professor in Rome, with his wifewhom he had married in 1922. The happiness ofthose years was brutally ended when an alliedbombardment of Hamburg, in the night of 24–25 July 1943, destroyed Genzmer’s house, hislibrary and all his notes (including pricelessmaterial from his teacher Emil Seckel). Theprofessor eventually overcame this tragedy, buthis wife never recovered from the trauma andlost all zest for life.

Genzmer’s path-breaking work was devotedto medieval Roman law. It took the form ofeditions of treatises, but also of fundamentalmonographs. I refer here, for example, to hisJustinianische Kodifikation und die Glossatorenof 1934, which was ostensibly a paper read at acongress, but in fact amounted to a book of 185pages and a breakthrough for the study of thefirst School of Bologna. It was therefore fittingthat the University of Bologna granted him, in1963, an honorary degree.

It was natural that the historian of thesupranational neo-Roman law was a convincedEuropean, with many international contacts,particularly in Italy and France. It is thereforeunderstandable that he was active from the startin the vast European undertaking of the »NewSavigny«. It was in 1815–1831 that Friedrich

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28 pp. systematic bibliography ofhis œuvre.

Karl von Savigny published his Geschichte desrömischen Rechts im Mittelalter (second ed.1834–1851), so by the middle of the twentiethcentury it was obvious that this fundamentalpioneering – but never replaced – work was inneed of a thorough overhaul. It was equallyobvious that this vast work, covering the wholeof medieval Latin Christianity, could not beundertaken by a single scholar, as the massiveresearch of the past hundred years was toodaunting. A collective enterprise was the obviousanswer, and that is what was proposed in 1953to the Société des Droits de l’Antiquité. Genz-mer’s programme was accepted and he wasinvited to be its general director. He spent therest of his life on finding and guiding some sixtycollaborators from numerous countries, editingthe fascicules and negotiating with the publish-ers. His Ius Romanum Medii Aevi may beconsidered Genzmer’s life’s work.11

It is with nostalgia and even some sadnessthat one looks at the ambitious Einteilung desGesamtwerkes, in 11 volumes, of September1960 and the footnote announcing that the»final detailed table of contents would appearat the completion of the work«.12 There is sad-ness because the enterprise was never completedand IRMAE is a torso, consisting of disjointedessays on disconnected topics, written by special-ists who happened to be working on the EdictumTheoderici, the Breviarium Alarici, the School ofMontpellier or the University of Basel in thefifteenth century. There were also monographson Roman law in various countries, varyingfrom 27 pp. on Normandy to 212 pp. on Ger-many.

There is no doubt that those 39 fasciculesgreatly enhanced our knowledge of medievalRoman law, one of the pillars of Europeancivilization, as they were the work of such

eminent specialists as Robert Feenstra, FrançoisLouis Ganshof, Jean Gaudemet, André Gouron,Peter Stein, Giulio Vismara, Franz Wieacker orJean Yver. Nevertheless, these membra disjectawere a far cry from Genzmer’s grandiose plan.

It is an interesting question why this hap-pened. The death of Genzmer in 1970 was surelya fatal blow, as no scholar with his erudition,dedication and charm was forthcoming to con-tinue his work. Some twenty fascicules appearedin the seventies and (the last) in 1981, which hadbeen planned before, but then the curtain fell.Another blow was the fact that the fundamentalextensive sections on the Schools of Bolognafailed to materialize: what was published con-cerned the periphery rather than the heartland ofthe ius romanum medii aevi. I do not know ifthere was a financial problem, but I can imaginethat the absence of any remuneration may havediscouraged some potential authors. It is alsopossible that, generally speaking, the enthusiasmfor this sort of vast international project haddiminished. The unfortunate result was that westill have to live without a »New Savigny«.

Another initiative of Erich Genzmer wasborn under a luckier star. Indeed, he took thefirst steps that led to the foundation of the Max-Planck-Institute for European legal history inFrankfurt. As the late Professor Helmut Coing,who was for many years its Director, explained,it was Genzmer who drafted the first memoran-da and convinced the leaders of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft that the Institute made sense andwas even necessary: it became a great and lastingsuccess.13

I first met Erich Genzmer in the 1950s at theBrussels home of Professor Fernand De Visscher,the President of the Société des Droits de l’An-tiquité. The Director of IRMAE invited me tocontribute to his enterprise and our talk took

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11 For some details on the planningof the enterprise and the role ofthe famous Leiden professorE. M. Meijers, who proposedGenzmer as director, see the Pré-face by F. De Visscher in Pars I,1 a–d of IRMAE, Milan 1961,5–9. See also Genzmer’s own ac-count: Das römische Recht alseuropäischer Kulturfaktor und derPlan einer neuen »AllgemeinenGeschichte des römischen Rechts

im Mittelalter«, in: Acta congres-sus Madvigiani, I, 1958, pp. 267–279.

12 Op. cit. (n. 11) 13–24.13 See on all this H. Coing, In memo-

riam Erich Genzmer, in: SavignyZeitschrift R. A. 88 (1971) 574–588, with a bibliography compiledby E. Immel.

place in an informal atmosphere, inter alia,because our host also came from my home cityof Ghent, where his family used to live in thesame street as my father. Genzmer was a tall,elegant, quiet and patient man, with whom itwas easy to come to an understanding. When Icasually asked him whether this was his first visitto Brussels, he gave a negative reply and changedthe subject, as if he was reluctant to expatiate.Much later I discovered that he in fact had, fromJune 1915 till May 1917, lived as a young lawyerin Brussels, as assistant to the Governor Generalfor the Zivilverwaltung (civil administration) ofoccupied Belgium. Afterwards we kept in touchabout my contribution and I was always glad toreceive his off-prints with their friendly inscrip-tions.

John Gilissen (1912–1988), distinguishedlegal historian, professor and magistrate. Hestudied history and law at the University ofBrussels, where he became a licentiate in historyin 1934 and a doctor in law in 1935 and wherehe started teaching in 1938, being appointedordinary professor in 1948. He taught legalhistory and the general history of the nineteenthand twentieth centuries for students in law andin history. He lectured in French in the Univer-sité Libre de Bruxelles and in Dutch in the VrijeUniversiteit Brussel. He, moreover, taught acourse on the history of art, one of his earliestfields of research.

Gilissen might well have said: »Zwei Seelensind in meiner Brust« for he had two diploma’s,two careers and two languages. Indeed, he wasborn in the Flemish town of Dendermonde, inthe northern Dutch-speaking part of Belgiumand had his first schooling in his Dutch mothertongue, but when the family moved to Brussels,he went to school there in French. His studies in

Brussels were all in French, at that time the onlylanguage of the University there, but when afterthe war, a Dutch-speaking Free University ofBrussels was founded, Gilissen had a full teach-ing load in both universities in both languages.Nobody asked him whether he was a Fleming ora francophone until he retired in 1982 when, ashe told me with a wry smile, the competentbureaucrat told him that he could only be en-tered as a pensioner on one of the two registers,the French or the Dutch. So at that late stageJohn Gilissen decided that he was really a Flem-ing, which accorded with where he was born.

During all these years Gilissen had a second,equally active career as a magistrate. Already in1938 he started in the office of the public pro-secutor in Brussels and in 1945 in that of thesupreme court martial in the same place, wherein 1965 he became General Auditor. In normaltimes the military courts are not very busy, but inthe post-war years, with the repression of acts ofcollaboration under the German occupation ofBelgium, they had a full schedule. Gilissen didall this practical work, while at the same timeconducting research on the procedure of themilitary courts and its modernization. Gilissen’scareers both came to an end upon his retirementin 1982.

Gilissen, the professor and the magistrate,was first and foremost a scholar, who publishedor edited some 8.000 printed pages of studiesand reference works. In his earlier years heconfined his interest to the legal history of theLow Countries in the Middle Ages and thesixteenth century. His teaching in history alsoled to studies on the recent history of Belgium.Although already in the thirties his teacher,Jacques Pirenne, a son of the famous medievalist,widened his horizon to lands and civilizations farbeyond his native country, it was only in 1950,

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when Gilissen accepted the job of General Sec-retary of the Société Jean Bodin pour l’histoirecomparative des institutions, that he entered theinternational and even world-wide scene. In-deed, as secretary and eventually president ofthat Society, he organized congresses, invitedpapers from around the world, wrote the »syn-thesis« – a sort of summing up of the lectures –and got them published. Each congress had aparticular theme – the law of evidence, for exam-ple – and heard papers on numerous countriesand civilizations from tribal Africa to moderndemocracies. Some of these congresses coveredno less than 170 papers which were publishedin no less than six stout volumes in the Recueilsof the Society. With Gilissen as secretary, from1951 to 1984, forty volumes covering twentycongresses saw the light of day.

The crowning achievement of his encyclo-paedic endeavour came with the publication, in1979, of his Introduction historique au droit(Dutch edition in 1981). The book of some800 pp. contains three parts, beginning with aworld history of law, followed by a presenta-tion of the sources of Belgian law from thethirteenth century onwards and concludes withthe analysis of select topics of private law. Eachone, such as marriage, property, inheritance,evidence or obligations, is situated in Roman,Germanic, Frankish, canon, feudal and custom-ary law, as well as modern jurisprudence. Eachtopic is illustrated with extracts from selectsources.

John Gilissen was not only preoccupied withhis own achievements and his reputation as acreative author, he was also, altruistically, deter-mined to put reference works at the disposal ofhis fellow scholars. He undertook the compila-tion of bibliographies – that most ungrateful ofendeavours. A good bibliography is a priceless

instrument for all prospective authors, showingwhat has already been achieved, what the lacu-nae are and where they can find the necessarysources and secondary literature. Gilissen under-took the herculean task of editing a world bib-liography of legal history and ethnology (in thefootsteps of the fantastic undertaking of hiscompatriots P. Otlet and H. Lafontaine). It wasa mind-boggling and even reckless endeavour,which he undertook while being the director ofthe Centre d’Histoire et d’Ethnologie juridiquesof the Institute for Sociology of the University ofBrussels. It was his task to invite dozens ofscholars to compile selective booklists on theirrespective fields, to edit the volumes and to dealwith the publisher. This reference work wouldfrom 1965 onwards see the light of day in eightvolumes totalling 125 bibliographies.

A comparable enterprise for Belgian legalhistory was less lucky. Undertaken and super-vised by Gilissen and compiled by a team of sixyoung scholars, the work was accomplished infour years and contained some 8.500 titles, aswell as an introduction by Gilissen, written in1965. Financial problems unfortunately prevent-ed the completion and publication, but a photo-copied version of the typed slips was made intwo volumes in 1985 and sent to various libra-ries and scholars under the title Bibliographie del’histoire du Droit des Provinces Belges.14

Gilissen clearly was a globalist avant lalettre, who gave lectures in numerous countrieson all continents. Among the official recogni-tions he received are his membership of theRoyal Flemish Academy of Sciences and hono-rary degrees in Lille, Strasbourg and Paris.

I knew John Gilissen very well. We metregularly on the Board of Directors of the SociétéJean Bodin, at the meetings of the Belgian RoyalCommission of Ancient Laws, on the Editorial

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14 Gilissen’s publications are listedin: Liber Amicorum John Gilissen.Code et constitution, mélangeshistoriques. Wetboek en grondwetin historisch perspectief, Brussels1983, XV–XXXI. Addenda forthe period 1983–88 are to befound in Ph. Godding, In Memo-riam John Gilissen, in: The LegalHistory Review 57 (1989) 18–19.

Committee of The Legal History Review andthe meetings of the Wissenschaftliche Beirat ofthe Max-Planck-Institute in Frankfurt. It is, ifan anecdote is allowed here, at one of thosegatherings that I consulted him, as a wise olderman, on the question whether I should acceptthe invitation of the dean of my Law Faculty,Professor Spanoghe, in 1968 to start a newcourse on the history of public law. I hesitatedbecause I already had a full workload in twoFaculties and was wary of more examinations.Gilissen strongly advised me to accept, as a dutyto our discipline and because of the importanceof the subject matter (which he taught in Brus-sels). Afterwards I was thankful that I took hisadvice, as I came to enjoy teaching that course,which eventually led to my Historical Introduc-tion to Western Constitutional Law. Gilissenalso, with characteristic generosity, gave me hisBrussels course, which was a great help for themodern part, with which as a medievalist I wasnot familiar.

John was a most friendly person, alwaysgood humoured and dying to be of help: hefound it very difficult to say »no«. He couldhave a good laugh at himself: one evening heappeared for dinner in our house wearing themost unexpected uniform of a general in theBelgian army. Greatly amused by our puzzle-ment, he explained that he came straight from aTe Deum in the cathedral of Brussels, which heattended in his capacity of General Auditor. Notbeing fond of military show, he quickly wentupstairs and reappeared in civilian attire, readyfor dinner.

John also was a good raconteur. One day hetold my wife and me in graphic detail how heand the art historian Leo van Puyvelde in 1945found Van Eyck’s missing Mystic Lamb fromGhent cathedral in a salt mine in Austria. One

can imagine the two scholars’ astonishmentwhen suddenly, armed with a torch and crouch-ing in a dark underground corridor, they lookedupon the famous Madonna of Michelangelofrom the Lady church in Bruges and a momentlater the – intact – Ghent altarpiece (afterwardsGilissen made a written note of his recollectionof this remarkable event).

The most striking thing about him was hiscapacity for work. After a day in the law courtsor the University he worked deep into the nighton his other occupations. He told me that heused to write his General Synthesis at the end ofeach Jean Bodin conference all through the nightin order to present it, based on dozens of papers,the following morning (these nightly drafts werelater reworked and published in the Recueils ofthe Société Jean Bodin). It was often said that hehad a great gift for organization, but I believethat this so-called gift was quite simply the out-come of hard work and attention to detail. Whenpeople praise someone’s gift for organization,they often feel they are lucky to find someoneelse to do the hard job.

John was happily married to the historianSuzanne Valschaerts, a charming lady from Os-tend and his life-long support. They lived nearthe Observatory of Ukkel, a prosperous part ofBrussels, in an attractive villa. She died in 1978,leaving him a widower for ten years, duringwhich he had a Moroccan housekeeper, a devoutMoslem who kindly sent him on errands to thelocal department store – which pleased andamused him.

He never talked to me about politics. Hetaught in the Freethinking University of Brusselsand I supposed his sympathies lay with theLiberal Party. Extreme ideologies were not hisbusiness. He was a realist who, as a magistrate,had seen life as it actually was.

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Gilissen was not interested in system-build-ing. Although he disposed of an immense reser-voir of data, he never worked out a set of modelsafter the fashion of Max Weber (whom, by theway, I never heard him mention). So, no »laws ofhistory« or »lessons from the past«. He was apositivist who went on collecting building mate-rials without ever turning them into a building.But the data he collected are there for everyoneto use and I doubt if any scholar nowadays iseven thinking of emulating him.

The question will be asked what inspiredhim. Of course, there was intellectual curiosityand personal ambition. But more was needed tokeep him going day and night. He believed in thelegal order as the only alternative to anarchy:law could bring peace between individuals andnations. So the profound study of law, in timeand in space, was useful to enlighten our under-standing of the legal order and improve itschances of success. What also drove Gilissenon was his aversion to war and his hope forpeace, in Europe and the world. As a boy, he fledwith his parents from his native land to Englandunder the onslaught of the German invasion in1914. Twenty years later he witnessed the atroc-ities of another European (turned world wide)war, so he tried ceaselessly to bring people ofdifferent countries and nations together and tohelp them to understand each other. After 1945dreams of universal brotherhood and a worldorder under the aegis of the United Nations werevery much in the air.

Every life has its disappointments and Gilis-sen had his fair share. Time was not granted himto write a book, which he often mentioned to me,about the post-1944 repression of World War IIcollaboration in Belgium. It was never written,which is a great pity because John as GeneralAuditor was in the unique position of having

control of and full access to the relevant archives.The dream of universal brotherhood was bitterlyshattered by the cold war and the difficult rela-tions with eastern Europe. Time and again Sovietscholars who were registered for John’s confer-ences had to cancel their trips at the last minutebecause of some obscure problem.

On a more personal level John suffered somefinancial disappointment. In the glorious sixtieshe had bought a manor house somewhere nearLibramont, which was built for one of Napo-leon’s generals. It was a pleasant place, althoughin need of repair. The Editorial Committee ofThe Legal History Review occasionally metthere, and one day a local farmer turned up witha cartload of wood for the open fire. So, whenJohn said he had not ordered any, the farmerexplained that as lord of the manor the professorwas entitled – in true medieval fashion – to ayearly cartload of wood. John had planned torenovate this summer residence after he retired,counting on two substantial pensions to defraythe cost. Unfortunately by the time he was 65 thelaw was changed, the combination of his twopensions – as a magistrate and as a professor –was abolished and the amount of the remainingpension reduced, so the ambitious renovationplan was shelved.

In the intellectual field Jean Bodin also heldsome disappointments. The massive tomes of theRecueils contained no real comparisons. Eachspecialist contributor wrote about his own ter-rain without reference to his neighbour; thespeakers usually did not even know or talk toeach other. This meant that Jean Bodin did notget much further – the saving ground being tosome extent John’s summaries – than the famousBuchbindersynthese. Also disappointing was thefact that the treasures of information containedin those volumes were seldom cited by legal

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historians or lawyers – I and my fellow directorsof the Society had the unhappy impression thatthe learned world did not make adequate use ofthat unique goldmine. I have already mentionedthe sad fact that Gilissen’s Belgian bibliographyfound no publisher. The world bibliography hasbeen overtaken by technology, as we now haveunlimited on line information which is con-stantly brought up to date.

That John Gilissen brought so many schol-ars together was positive, although its enduringeffect is hard to assess. What remains of hisoeuvre are his detailed studies, which will neverbe repeated, and his encyclopaedic Introductionto Legal History, which will be read and con-sulted for many years to come.

Stephan Kuttner (1907–1996) was an emi-nent historian of canon law and University pro-fessor. In 1930 he received his Law degree fromthe University of Berlin, where he had UlrichStutz as a teacher. Kuttner was born in Bonnfrom Jewish ancestors, but raised as a Lutheranand became a Roman Catholic in 1932. Thefollowing year he left Nazi-Germany for Rome,where he had done manuscript research since1930, and worked at the Vatican Library andtaught at the Lateran University. In 1940 heemigrated to the United States and taught atthe Catholic University of America in Washing-ton until 1964, when he moved to Yale, until,from 1970 to 1988, he was Director of theRobbins Collection in Roman and Canon Lawat Berkeley where, after 1988, he continued asemeritus professor of Law until his death.

While in Washington, he founded the Insti-tute of Medieval Law over which he presided fortwenty-five years. The Institute was devoted totextual scholarship in medieval canon law,which at once indicates his own special field of

research. Indeed, Stephan Kuttner saw as hislife’s work tracing and identifying the (mainlyunprinted) sources, rather than writing learnedmonographs on canonical doctrine. He was, asDomenico Maffei put it, a muratore rather thanan architetto.15 He felt that it was premature tostudy the contents of ecclesiastical law beforeone disposed of the instruments to trace andknow the relevant sources, identify their authors,locate the manuscripts and register the bestmodern editions, if any. That Kuttner was wellequipped to go beyond this self-denying task,was demonstrated by his Kanonistische Schuld-lehre of 1935, but then he decided that hismanuscript studies, creating the necessary infra-structure for the historians of canon law, was alegitimate priority. It is in this context that hefounded the series Monumenta Iuris Canoniciand the Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law, anindependent journal which as from 1971, con-tinued the information published as from 1955in Traditio.

Kuttner’s innumerable studies on treatises,decretal collections, canons of Church councilsand problematical manuscripts, as well as hiseditions of sources, stretching from 1931 to1966, have completely renewed canon law stud-ies and placed them altogether on a more solidbasis.16 His work was an immense help to allhis fellow historians, to whom, as Jean Gaude-met put it, he »gave generously the fruit of hislabour«.17 One great enterprise proved toomuch for Stephan’s »labour«. At a meeting withsome twenty specialists in Rome he outlined aproject for a new edition of Gratian’s Decretum,to replace Friedberg, but even the Institute hefounded in Washington in 1955 could not realizethis ambitious plan which, in Gaudemet’s words»se révéla de plus en plus complexe, aléatoire etsans doute irréalisable«, inter alia, because no

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15 Savigny Zeitschrift für Rechtsge-schichte K. A. 84 (1998) 684. Seealso the memoir on Stephan Kutt-ner by R. Brentano, R. Somer-ville, B. Tierney and T. N. Bis-son, in: Speculum 72 (1997) 929–931. For Kuttner’s life and workin Washington, see A. Hetzene-cker, Stephan Kuttner in Amerika1940–1964, Berlin 2007 (doctoraldissertation, Munich).

16 For a complete bibliography seewww.kuttner-institute.jura.uni-muenchen.de.

17 J. Gaudemet, Un grand historien:Stephan Kuttner, in: Revue histo-rique de droit français et étranger(1997) 1.

one knew where to find »un mythique Ur-Gra-tian«.18

His erudition and dedication were recog-nized by thirteen honorary degrees, beginningwith Bologna in 1952, and by his appointment in1967 by Pope Paul VI to the Pontifical Commis-sion for the Revision of the Code of Canon Law.He was also interested in the plans for a LexEcclesiae Fundamentalis, which failed to materi-alize. He liked discussing the reasons for thisfailure and blamed the fact that the canonistsfound no historical ground for a title on »thefaithful and their rights« and no suitable eccle-siastical terminology in traditional canon law,but the theologians also had grave doubts: wasnot the gospel the one and only constitution ofthe Church? I found this sort of conversationwith Stephan Kuttner most enlightening.

I met him several times beginning with theSecond International Congress of Medieval Ca-non Law at Boston in August 1963, which heorganized. He was at the height of his powersand his extensive network of international con-nections allowed him to invite scholars frommany parts of the world and bring them togetherin a very successful congress (and to edit itsproceedings, with 29 papers, in collaborationwith Mgr. Joseph Ryan). The congress wasenlivened by various functions and a final ban-quet. After the reception at the State House inBoston a group photo of the congressists wasmade on the steps in front of the House. It wasthere that I overheard an amusing altercationbetween Father Leonard Boyle (who later wentto the Vatican Library and is buried at SanClemente) and Professor Christopher Cheney.The learned Dominican tried to move his Prot-estant Cambridge colleague up a few steps, say-ing »so you will be a bit nearer to heaven« butadding »not that you will ever get there«, to

which Cheney replied: »Thank you, Father Boy-le, for this authoritative pronouncement«.

At another reception the congressists wereintroduced to Cardinal Cushing, the archbishopof Boston (of Irish descent), who on shakinghands with Cheney and hearing that he camefrom England, exclaimed: »Who would havethought that such a great train robbery couldtake place in such a small country?« (this was,of course, the year of Ronald Briggs’s famouscoup).

At the final banquet (if the reader permitsme another petite histoire) the Cardinal made aspeech ending with the words to Professor Kutt-ner: »I say, Stephen, get the papers of the con-gress printed and send the bill to me«. Wheneventually the papers had come off the press,Kuttner went to the archbishop’s palace withthe bill and was promptly given a cheque by asecretary. Remarking that it was not signed bythe cardinal himself, the secretary explained thathis master never signed cheques for less than50.000 dollars, far beyond the expense of thecanonists. When Stephan Kuttner told me thisstory, it struck me as very American.

After the congress Stephan Kuttner invitedme to his home in Washington, where he wasteaching. It was a welcoming place full of hisnumerous children. In the middle of our conver-sations I managed to be given a fair number ofhis off-prints which I still treasure. On a morepersonal note, he complained that his students inWashington were not really interested in re-search, as many of them were nuns, who justwanted to obtain their degree in order to go backhome to teach in some Catholic school wherethey were eagerly awaited. Years later he occa-sionally had a meal at our house when he wasnegotiating at the Press of De Meester in Wette-ren, where his Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law

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18 Gaudemet (n. 17) 5.

was being printed (Stephan was not only ascholar but was also a bit of a businessman).Around that time he also gave a lecture in Ghentat the invitation of Professor Strubbe. On allthose occasions I learnt a lot from ProfessorKuttner and found him a most friendly andinspiring person.

Gabriel Le Bras (1891–1970), professor,historian of canon law and religious sociologist.Born in Paimpol, a small fishing port in Brittany,he called himself Le Braz when he felt Bretonand Le Bra when (more often) he felt himselfFrench. Studied at the University of Rennes from1908 to 1911 and the University of Paris (1911–14), where he obtained a doctorate in PoliticalScience in 1922. He taught in Strasbourg from1923 to 1929 (where he knew Lucien Febvre andMarc Bloch) and from 1929 to 1964 in the ParisLaw Faculty, where he held the Chair of theHistory of Canon and Roman law and was deanfrom 1959 to 1962. At the same time, from 1922to 1964, he remained a professor at the Institutefor Canon Law at Strasbourg University.

I knew »le doyen Le Bras« – as he laterbecame generally known – as my professor oflegal history in the old Faculté de Droit on thePlace du Panthéon in 1951–52. His class, forabout twenty post-graduate students who pre-pared doctoral dissertations, was very lively andthe professor was always ready to talk to usabout our various fields of interest. He had asomewhat theatrical way of lecturing and couldget emotional, as when he said with great em-phasis: »It says in Scripture omnis potestas aDeo, but I say omnis potestas a diabolo«, wordshe repeated in his address of 20 February 1965(about which more later): he knew about thetemptation of power and hubris of »les monstresdont nous sommes victimes, les Etats« (ibid.).

In the same vein he often referred to »la grandepatience du peuple chrétien«. Le Bras dominatedhis audience in a paternal way, astonishing uswith his knowledge of the most obscure cornersof his subject: one student who had a questionon the Councils of Braga (A.D. 561 and 572)was given an impromptu lecture on their pro-ceedings and canons. This left us perplexed andconvinced us that the professor had the wholehistory of medieval canon law in his head andhad only to sit and write it down.

The learned man received me occasionally inhis apartment on the Place du Panthéon for aconversation and guidance (I was working at thetime on medieval criminal law, which had ob-vious connections with canon law). As we weretalking, surrounded by books, his children wereplaying with marbles on the floor: Le Bras wasmarried late to a student of his, hence the youngcompany. As we discussed medieval law, someyoung woman would turn up to talk about herthesis on religious sociology. This was a re-minder to me that the Law professor was alsoa leading sociologist, who organized a vastenquête on religious practice in modern France.I remember a large map of the country wherevarious regions were coloured according tochurch attendance. Some were still clearly Cath-olic, but others were almost »heathen«. Theinterpretation of the map was open to debate.It struck me that the more outlying parts (Brit-tany, Flanders, Alsace) tended to be more Cath-olic than the old, truly republican areas, but thisdid not seem to strike my interlocutors as sig-nificant.

Le Bras was full of attention for his students.One day early in 1952 he told me I should go inthe spring to Toulouse to attend the conferenceof the Société d’Histoire du Droit, and when Ireferred to the cost involved and my limited

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budget, he at once produced an allowance sothat I happily went to the first of my manyconferences organized by this Paris based Soci-ety. An American fellow-student who was alsoscheduled for Toulouse eventually cancelled hisregistration because he was »travelling to Italywith his mother«. He asked me to inform Le Brasand apologize. But when given this message theprofessor snorted sarcastically »with his moth-er?« and clearly had his doubts (which I myselfhad naively not entertained) about the identity ofthe student’s companion.

On another day the learned man said to me»Van Caenegem, I want you to come with me toRoyaumont where I am giving a lecture«. So offwe went together to this charming old Cistercianabbey north of Paris which was a popular cul-tural centre. Le Bras’s lecture was brilliant, andhe was so carried away that he was oblivious ofthe late hour, so late that we missed the last trainat Royaumont station to take us back to Paris.Not a bit disconcerted the professor explained tothe stationmaster that we had to get back to thecapital that evening, pointing out that he was aprofessor in the Law Faculty there. The railwayofficial was duly impressed, but could onlyrepeat that the last train had already left. Thesituation seemed hopeless, but salvation wasnigh: we perceived a distant rumble on the rail-way line: »What about this train that is ap-proaching?«. »But, Monsieur le Professeur, it isa goods train«. »Well, stop it here!« So thestationmaster put the light on red and the goodstrain duly gave us a lift to Paris and eventually toa taxi home.

Le Bras was first and foremost an historianof medieval canon law: with Paul Fournier hevisited innumerable libraries tracing manuscriptsof conciliar canons and papal decretals andwrote authoritative studies on many aspects of

the law of the Roman Church. The great historyof canon law, that we students expected him towrite (something comparable to the famousbook by Hans Erich Feine), never saw the lightof day (I often thought of a similar fate that befellGanshof’s biography of Charlemagne). Le Brasdid, however, initiate and supervise the imposingseries of monographs Histoire du droit et desinstitutions de l’Eglise en Occident, in which hewrote himself, in 1965, with Charles Lefebvreand Jacqueline Rambaud, vol. VII L’Age Clas-sique 1140–1378 (an indispensable overview ofthis cardinal period in some 600 pages). He alsowrote, in 1955, the Introductory volume of Pro-légomènes, which was a disappointing general-izing compensation for the great History that wehoped for.

He occasionally wrote to me on letter-paperof the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, whichintrigued me until I found out that he had beensince 1946 a Counsellor for Religious Affairs atthe Quai d’Orsay. The Vatican had to consultthe French government about the appointmentof bishops and Le Bras was the government’sman of confidence and trusted by both parties toplay a role – not widely known or discussed – inthe composition of the episcopal hierarchy of hiscountry.

Le Bras’s human qualities and scholarlyachievements received the recognition they de-served. He was made an honorary doctor of theUniversities of Liège, Louvain, Milan and Bolo-gna and became member of several academiesabroad and in France, where in 1962 he waselected to the Académie des Sciences morales etpolitiques of the Institut de France. I had theprivilege of assisting to the ceremony of theremise de l’épée d’académicien in the Law Fac-ulty in Paris on 20 February 1965. One of the tenspeakers was the new academician himself, who

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looked very happy and gave one of the bestspeeches I have ever heard, full of surprises andhumour and presented in a most beautiful lan-guage. He told his eminent colleagues who oneday (»soon, because of my age«) would beinvited to pronounce his éloges funèbres that inorder to spare them the extra work, he haddecided to present his own In Memoriam: afterall, who knew Le Bras and his work better thanLe Bras himself? His address began as follows:»Notre collègue naquit en 1891 à Paimpol, dansune famille qui n’avait point quitté la mer de-puis son périlleux embarquement sur l’Arche deNoé.« And in an amusing passage he recalledthat he had given many lectures in foreign lands,where he had noticed that »the less the audienceunderstood his French, the greater was his suc-cess«. Or, in his own words: »Il avait obtenu dessuccès d’autant plus grands que l’auditoire necomprenait pas notre langue« – adding, tonguein cheek »nouvelle preuve éclatante du prestigeintellectuel de la France«. In the same self de-precatory vain he said that »although he hadtalked a lot and written a lot« his »merits did notsurpass, if even they equalled those of a goodlabourer«.19

The evening after the ceremony Professorand Mrs. Le Bras invited a few foreign gueststo dinner in their apartment, i. e. Professor andMrs. F. L. Ganshof, Professor and Mrs. GiulioVismara and my wife and myself: it was anenjoyable occasion, with an unforgettable oldMeursault.

Around the same time Gabriel Le Bras re-ceived a Festschrift in two volumes entitledEtudes d’Histoire du Droit Canonique dédiéesà Gabriel Le Bras, Paris, 1965 (with a biblio-graphy, pp. IX–XXXIII). How I came to write init is an amusing story. In 1963 I was walkingwith Le Bras in the corridors of a conference in

Bologna when he (being rather short) pulled meby my lapel and whispered in my ear: »Do youwrite in my Festschrift?« And when I replied thatI did not, because I had not been asked, he said:»I want you to. I will see to that«. And indeed,when my wife and I were back home the follow-ing week, there was a letter from Pierre Timbalinviting me to contribute. So practical was thegreat canonist that he even organized (part of)his own Festschrift.

The doyen Le Bras is still remembered vi-vidly and gratefully which was demonstrated atthe much attended Journée Le Bras held in Parisat the Fondation del Duca on 6 April 2006, andwhere one of the speakers was the great scholar’swidow.

Bryce Lyon (1920–2007), eminent legal his-torian and medievalist. After four years with theUnited States Army Air Force in the Pacific Lyonstudied medieval history under Carl Stephensonat Cornell University, where he received hisdoctorate in 1949. After a short spell at Colo-rado he was an Assistant Professor of History atHarvard from 1951 to 1956. After three years inthe University of Illinois he was Professor ofHistory at Berkeley from 1959 to 1965, whenhe moved to Brown University in Providence,Rh. I., and taught there until his retirement in1986.

Bryce Lyon published important and inno-vative studies on various aspects of medievalfeudalism in England and on the Continent,starting with his 1951 dissertation on the useof the money fief by the English kings, followedby work on the fief-rente in the Low Countriesand the Indenture System. At the same time hewas interested in medieval constitutional textssuch as Magna Carta (1951) and in the compa-rative study of English and Belgian constitutio-

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19 For the full text see: Remise del’épée d’académicien et des Etudesd’histoire du droit canonique àGabriel Le Bras, doyen honorairede la Faculté de Droit et de Sci-ences économiques de Paris le20 février 1965 à la Faculté deDroit de Paris, Paris, 1965, 47 pp.

nal law (1956). His crowning achievement washis fundamental and thoughtful Constitutionaland legal history of medieval England (NewYork 1960, 2nd. ed. 1980).

His interest in the Low Countries went backto his mentor Carl Stephenson, who had studiedin Ghent under Henri Pirenne in 1924 and toBryce’s reading of The Low Countries and theHundred Years’ War by Henry S. Lucas, one ofthe few American medievalists who mastered theDutch language (as did Bryce himself later on).

Professor Lyon worked on the financial in-stitutions of the English monarchy and editedWardrobe Books in collaboration with his wifeMary. This interest led to his much broader bookof 1967, published in the series of the GhentFaculty of Letters under the title Medieval fi-nance. A comparison of financial institutions innorthwestern Europe and written in collabora-tion with his colleague Adriaan Verhulst, whowas an authority on the financial administrationof the counts of Flanders.

Professor Lyon taught the general history ofthe Middle Ages, which led to the textbookMedieval history: Europe from the second tothe sixteenth century, originally written by C.Stephenson and edited and revised in a fourthedition in 1961 by his pupil. Although theBrown University Professor worked mainly onthe later Middle Ages, this textbook showed hisfamiliarity with earlier periods, as did the trans-lation he and his wife made of a selection ofGanshof’s articles on the impact of Charlemagneon Frankish government and law, published in1968 under the title Frankish Institutions underCharlemagne.

Already as a student Bryce Lyon becamefamiliar with the writings of Henri Pirenne,which was natural for a young medievalist anda pupil of Carl Stephenson. In the course of the

years Lyon’s admiration steadily grew and hebecame interested in the famous medievalist, notonly as an historian of western Europe but alsoas a prominent figure in Belgian public life. Andso it came about that already in 1960 he pub-lished an appreciation of Pirenne’s oeuvre in theleading periodical Le Moyen Age. It was aroundthe same time that Lyon met count JacquesPirenne, the only surviving son of the medieval-ist, to whom Bryce had been introduced by aletter from Professor Ganshof. Jacques Pirenneencouraged his American colleague to write abiography of his father and put the latter’sNachlass at his disposal. So Bryce and Marywent to work on, inter alia, the letters received inGhent – some 800 from Maurice Prou alone –which Jacques had carefully pasted into morethan 200 volumes. For more than ten years thetwo American scholars devoted their time andattention to this vast undertaking, not only goingthrough the Pirenne archives, but tracing all overthe place letters sent by Pirenne. They also hadto enter into the intellectual and political life ofa bilingual European country, no mean task forcitizens from across the Atlantic. The result wasa stout and very detailed volume, published inGhent in 1974 under the title Henri Pirenne. ABiographical and Intellectual Study. Nor wasthis the end of the Lyons’s involvement withtheir hero, as they went on to publish a streamof articles on Pirenne and his correspondents andto edit his Journal de Guerre in 1976 and hisRéflexions d’un solitaire in 1994.

Writing on Pirenne did not mean the endof Bryce’s older interests in legal history, but itreduced his output in that field. Gelehrten-geschichte is a respected pursuit – and I am doingit myself in these very pages – but it is not themainstream of original research. We can onlyspeculate what Professor Lyon would have pro-

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duced in his original line if he had not spent somuch time and energy on the biography of »theman from Ghent«. He had, for example, thecapacity and the depth of vision to write aconstitutional history of the European MiddleAges, possibly under the title of the VariorumEdition of his selected articles of 1978, Studies ofWest European Medieval Institutions. Whetherthis would have been a more worthwhile pursuitis a moot point and who are we to questionBryce and Mary’s priorities ?

Bryce’s achievements received widespreadrecognition. Not only was he a member of nu-merous learned bodies, inter alia, of the RoyalFlemish Academy of Sciences, but he wasgranted honorary degrees by Baldwin-WallaceCollege and Ghent University, and a Festschriftedited in 1990 by Bernard S. Bachrach andDavid Nicholas under the title Law, Custom,and the Social Fabric of Medieval Europe (with abibliography, pp. XV–XXII). Bryce and Maryalso greatly enjoyed being received in a privateaudience by King Baudouin upon publication oftheir biography of Pirenne, who in 1924–25 hadbeen a teacher of his father, King Leopold III, inGhent.

I knew Bryce very well. I met him on numer-ous occasions and our two families became closefriends. In 1962 my wife and I were havingdinner in Brussels with Bryce and Mary at thetime of the Cuba crisis, when the learned manexpected any moment to be called up for militaryservice as a reserve officer. At that time the Lyonswere going through the Pirenne correspondenceduring a prolonged stay in the Belgian capital.The following year I stayed with them in Berke-ley, where they were most friendly hosts. In 1974our family and our friends the Van Houttes (bothwith three children) spent a month’s holiday atEast Alstead, where Bryce and Mary had a sum-

mer house: their hospitality was warm and fullof kindness. I kept corresponding frequentlywith Bryce till the year he died.

Professor Lyon gave numerous guest lec-tures in Ghent and we had common friendsthere. Bryce and Mary spent some time at thehouse of Professor and Mrs. Marcel Storme inGhent. Bryce also had warm contacts with Dr.Carlos Wyffels, who assisted him in his work inthe archives of Ghent and Brussels, and withProfessor Adriaan Verhulst, with whom, as Imentioned before, he wrote a book on financialinstitutions. Bryce and Mary also became closefriends of the Ganshofs. Bryce knew ProfessorGanshof from 1951 onwards, when he was aBelgian-American Educational Foundation fel-low. I vividly remember a tea party the Lyonsgave in September 1973 at the hotel in Deurlewhere they spent a memorable summer month.Bryce already had invited Professor Ganshof togive guest lectures on Frankish institutions inBerkeley, where the Ganshofs spent the academicyear 1963–64, pampered by their hosts. TheLyons had two distinct circles of friends inBelgium, one in Brussels around the Pirennefamily and one in Ghent around the medievalistsin the archives and the University.

Bryce was a typical American intellectual,with his bald head, heavily rimmed glasses,colourful clothes, boundless energy and directstyle in meeting people. His love of Europe wasdeeply felt and concerned all aspects of its cul-ture and social life. He was a lively conversation-alist and could be outspoken in his criticism (ofsome politicians in his own country, for exam-ple). His friendships were sincere and lasting. Hewas a brilliant teacher, who spontaneously anddirectly engaged his students with questions orprovocative asides. Bryce also was a dedicatedfamily man, devoted to his two children and his

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wife Mary, herself a classical scholar and his life-long support. His numerous friends and studentsremember him warmly.

Theodore Frank Thomas Plucknett (1897–1965) was an eminent historian of English lawand professor at the University of London.Whereas most of my heroes went from Law toHistory, Plucknett went the other way, startinglife as an historian before turning into one of themost learned authorities on the English commonlaw. Having matriculated at London Universityin 1913, he graduated in history in 1915, obtain-ing his M. A. degree in 1917. The following yearhe went to Cambridge, where in 1920 he ob-tained a bachelor’s degree in Law (without legaltraining) with a thesis published in 1922 underthe title Statutes and their interpretation in thefirst half of the fourteenth century. With a Har-vard fellowship he in 1921 attended the LawSchool there, first as a student and soon after-wards as a member of the staff. It was on theinitiative of Roscoe Pound that he started teach-ing legal history, the beginning of a career offorty years, not all of them in America, however,for in 1931 the Assistant Professor of LegalHistory in the Harvard Law School returned toEngland. The story goes that an eminent Englishhistorian and politician, Harold Laski, since1926 professor of Political Science in London,visited Harvard and was surprised to find abrilliant young countryman there, whom heenticed to come back home and accept the newchair of legal history at the London School ofEconomics. In this way Plucknett became one ofthe four full-time professors in the Law Facultyof the University of London.

Plucknett wrote several monographs on as-pects of English law, betraying a special interestin constitutional history (government, Parlia-

ment, state trials, Bonham’s case). He also editedmedieval case law (Year Book of 13 Richard IIin 1929), but he is generally best known for hisexcellent Concise History of the Common Law,which was written in his Harvard days, firstpublished in New York in 1929 and wentthrough five editions between that year and(London) 1956. As an introduction to the sub-ject it is unparallelled because of its logicalstructure, analytical power and comprehensive-ness, as it includes extensive chapters on privatelaw, i. e. real property, contract, equity andsuccession. Not the least of its merits is that theauthor found it »necessary to place the history ofEnglish law in its setting of canon, civil, andgeneral European law« (Preface to fifth edition)– not self-evident to specialists of English law.

Editions of the original sources provide thehistorian’s indispensable materials, as they con-sist not only of transcripts of old manuscripts,but also of introductions, commentaries andindexes. It is therefore as literary director of theSelden Society that Plucknett deserves our pro-found gratitude. He became one of its threedirectors in 1937 and remained alone at thehelm after the death of G. T. Turner in 1946.He continued this ungrateful but indispensabletask until shortly before his death, which meantthat he had a hand in some twenty volumes.20

Professor Plucknett’s merits were duly recog-nized. He was a member or president of learnedsocieties and received honorary degrees at Glas-gow, Birmingham and Cambridge.

Plucknett’s character combined extremekindness with extreme reserve, even elusiveness.Although he was most friendly, he did not go infor many friendships. He was rather small, had around pale face and was always impeccably andformally dressed, wearing a bow-tie. He was aquiet man, whom one could not imagine gesti-

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20 For a presentation of Plucknett’sœuvre see S. F. C. Milsom, Theo-dore Frank Thomas Plucknett1897–1965, in: Proceedings of theBritish Academy 51 (1965), Lon-don 1966, 505–19.

culating or being exuberant. I often thought ofhim as a typical Oxford or Cambridge don and Iwondered why he stayed at LSE, until I realizedhow important the proximity of the Public Re-cord Office was. His life in Wimbledon wassecluded. He left in the morning for Aldwychor Chancery Lane (doing his crosswords on thetrain?) and returned home quite late (he had anevening as well as a day class) and went straightto his study and his books and manuscripts. Myold friend Howard Drake, the librarian of theInstitute of Advanced Legal Studies in London,told me that when, after the professor’s death, hewent to his house, he found that the son did notreally grasp what his father’s job had been andwhat he had achieved.

What a contrast with Walter Ullmann, an-other of my heroes, continental exuberance ver-sus English phlegm! The one uprooted and inexile, constantly on the move from one interna-tional meeting to another, the other firmly rootedin the solid English soil, moving for more than30 years between Wimbledon and London (witha yearly holiday in France), but never returningto America. I have often wondered if they evermet (possibly at some function of the RoyalHistorical Society?), as their interests were sodifferent. We know, however, of one functionwhen their roads – unwittingly – crossed. WhenUllmann had finished his first book, on Lucas dePenna, he sent the manuscript to the CambridgeUniversity Press, which rejected it. Blackwells inOxford similarly turned it down. Walter thencontacted Methuen, who accepted it after a mostfavourable report by Plucknett.21

Plucknett betrayed no interest in theory orgeneralization and I had no idea what his politicsor religion were. I knew him in his dual role ofteacher and supervisor. I arrived in London in1952 hoping to do research on English medieval

law. On the Continent I had worked on Flemishcriminal law and been struck by some similaritiesbetween the modernisation of the legal system inEngland under King Henry II and in Flandersunder Count Philip of Alsace. Wanting to findout more about the English side, I thought someresearch in that country was called for. ProfessorGanshof encouraged me and suggested Plucknettas the specialist par excellence. So from 1952 to1954 I took his advanced class on English legalhistory in a small room at the London Schoolof Economics, where we were two students, anEnglish cleric, whom I never got to know, andmyself. Only one other continental student hadgone – before the Second World War – to thisclass, a young Hungarian, George Bonis, wholater became a professor in his own country.

Plucknett lectured in a quiet, rather distantway on thirteenth-century private law (marita-gium, inheritance, the curtesy of England, dowerex assenssu patris) on the basis of his intimateknowledge of the court rolls (although Bractonwas never far away). He also welcomed ourquestions.

It was, however, as my supervisor that Icame to know Plucknett better. When I askedhim to direct my research on the common law, hedid not throw his hands up in despair at thethought of a young continental student engagingon the arcana of Glanvill’s Treatise, but waswelcoming and encouraging for, although theprofessor was firmly rooted in England and itshistory, he was not insular. He knew the Con-tinent, had married a French wife and spent hisholidays in her country. He had moreoverstudied canon law in his Cambridge days andkept a lively interest in the subject. Transnationalwork did not put him off. When we talked abouta suitable subject, I mentioned legal fiction in thecommon law (a suggestion of Professor René

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21 E. Ullmann, Walter Ullmann. ATale of Two Cultures, Cambridge,1990, 39.

Dekkers, who had written a book on La fictionjuridique), but Plucknett found it too vague anddifficult and proposed instead that I work onthe writ procedure under Henry II, the core ofthe early common law. He was personally inter-ested because of a possible continental and es-pecially canon law influence: was the writ ofnovel disseisin modelled on the actio spolii? Hethought that as I had heard the canonist GabrielLe Bras the previous year, I was better placedthan most English legal historians to look intothese questions. I accepted his suggestion be-cause I knew I could always consult him if somestumbling block arose. So I saw him regularlyand was lucky to have such a learned and patientguide. He occasionally overcame my doubts, aswhen some historian had written an articlewhich went so much against my own vision thatI was upset, but when I mentioned it to mysupervisor he said, with a wry smile: »I thinkthe author had had too much good English alewhen he wrote that.«

As my project involved going through all therelevant narrative and non-narrative texts of theAnglo-Norman and Angevin period, Plucknettmade the practical suggestion that I should makea note of every lawsuit I came across – whetherroyal writs were involved or not – in view of anew edition of Bigelow’s Placita Anglo-Nor-mannica of 1879, a pioneering work that neededto be overhauled. His initiative led eventually tomy English Lawsuits in the Selden Society vol-umes 106 and 107 – alas well after Plucknett’sdeath. He lived long enough, however, to seethe publication of my Royal Writs in 1959, theresult of research undertaken under his guid-ance. As it was a Selden Society volume and hewas its literary director, he read every line of mythesis before it went, with his imprimatur, to theprinter. His seal of approval was a huge relief for

a continental scholar who ventured into the(treacherous?) territorial waters of the Englishcommon law, »where angels fear to tread« (thereader familiar with Alexander Pope’s Essay onMan will remember that the full line reads: »Forfools rush in where angels fear to tread«).

Wilfried Roels (1926–2007) was a legalhistorian and professor of Roman law. Afterstudies in Ghent and Brussels he obtained, in1958 in Brussels, his habilitation in Roman lawunder René Dekkers, whose assistant he wasfrom 1953 onwards. He started teaching inBrussels in 1958 and in Ghent in 1960 where,in 1972, he was promoted to ordinary professorof Roman law in the Law Faculty. In Ghent hehad become, in 1949, a licentiate in History and,in 1951, obtained his doctorate in Law.22 Roels’sscholarly output was not extensive, which beliedthe promise of his early, outstanding thesis onthe use of Roman law in the sixth-century LexRomana Burgundionum.23 It established Roels’sreputation as a most erudite scholar and a coura-geous man, not afraid of tackling obscure peri-ods and awkward problems concerning, interalia, the date of the Lex, where Roels refutedthe herrschende Lehre. His book was extensivelyused by G. Chevrier and G. Piéri in their fasciculeLa loi romaine des Burgondes in Genzmer’s IusRomanum Medii Aevi. I refer the reader here towhat the eminent legal historian Robert Feenstrahas written about Roels’s impact on Chevrierand Piéri in his review of Genzmer’s enterprise.24

I knew Wilfried very well, as we were stu-dents together in History and in Law and wereafterwards for many years colleagues in theUniversity of Ghent. He was highly intelligentand very independent. In Ganshof’s seminaron Charlemagne’s capitularia, Wilfried’s fellowstudents were astonished when he, unimpressed

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22 See the In Memoriam by D. Heir-baut and B. Debaenst, in: TheLegal History Review 75 (2007)437–438.

23 Onderzoek naar het gebruik vande aangehaalde bronnen vanRomeins recht in de Lex RomanaBurgundionum, Antwerp 1958.

24 Savigny Zeitschrift für Rechtsge-schichte R. A. 87 (1970) 558–559.

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by the great specialist’s authority, stubbornlybegged to differ and defended his own under-standing of the precaria (on which he was writ-ing his licentiate thesis with Ganshof as pro-moter). I vividly remember how at a particularlesson Wilfried brought along a book that wentagainst the professor’s views, whereupon thelatter, the following week, came along with acouple of books that supported his interpreta-tion. However, the next week Wilfried turned upwith an even bigger pile of books, on his side.The students eventually felt that Ganshof wonthe match, but only on points, and Wilfried wasnot convinced.

My learned friend was a real eccentric of atype that one associates with England ratherthan the Continent. Thus he surprised his stu-dents with the suggestion that they should giveeach other examination-marks – an innovationthey decidedly rejected as they feared a lot of illfeeling and thought the examiner should do hisown work. On another occasion Professor Roelstold his students that they could, in small groups,write a common essay, which would serve as anexamination paper. This innovation unfortu-nately also misfired when three students cameto me, as chairman of the examining board, toexpress their bafflement when they found thattheir professor had, for one and the same essay,given one student a high mark, another a passand had failed the third. The friendly talk I hadwith Wilfried quickly helped this »misunder-standing« out of the world. At another time theprofessor annoyed his students by announcing inthe middle of the academic year that he disagreedwith what he taught them the previous monthsso that they could forget it: bad luck for thediligent youngsters who had done their best toabsorb and memorize it all. But the climax ofWilfried’s eccentricities was reached when, quite

formally during the monthly meeting of thecouncil of the Faculty, he suggested to the deanthat one of the Law chairs should be abolished.To everyone’s amazement it turned out that itwas his own chair he wanted to be the victim,Roman law having lost its relevance in themodern world. The Faculty did not follow himand Roman law remains till this day a compul-sory course for first year Law students. It was,however, noticeable that Wilfried became lessenthusiastic about teaching the course himself.

My learned friend had well known left-wingsympathies and gave wholehearted support tothe revolting students in the seventies. He heldno religious beliefs but was curious about theo-logy, posing intriguing and even awkward ques-tions about the more obscure tenets of theChristian faith, baffling some people who weresupposed to know about them. None of this,however, detracted from the esteem and warmfeelings of the colleagues, staff and studentstowards this most friendly and learned man.

Egied Idesbald Strubbe (1897–1970) wasborn in Bruges and studied Law in Leuven,where he obtained his doctorate in 1921. Hepractised at the Bar of his native city till theSecond World War, but spent a good deal of timedoing historical research. Already as a student heused his summer holidays to copy charters in thearchives of Bruges, teaching himself palaeogra-phy and diplomatic. Without ever obtaining adegree in History he became an outstandinghistorian of law and political institutions. Onthe strength of his early publications he startedteaching an unpaid course on national legalhistory in the University of Ghent in 1931 andwas in 1935 appointed docent for General LegalHistory. By Decree of the Regent of 14 April1945 he was made an ordinary professor with

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retroactive effect to 1 January 1944. He alsotaught, inter alia, Political Institutions of Mod-ern Times and in 1962 started teaching Histor-ical Introduction to Civil Law, a compulsorycourse for all Law students.

Egied Strubbe wrote numerous books andarticles on the history of law and institutions,mainly in Flanders and Brabant, as well as anindispensable reference work, compiled in col-laboration with Dr. L. Voet, on the HistoricalChronology of the Low Countries.25 His meritswere rewarded with memberships of suchlearned bodies as the Royal Commission forAncient Laws, the Royal Historical Commissionand the Royal Flemish Academy of Sciences andArts.

Of all the legal historians in my gallery EgiedStrubbe was the most amiable and good-na-tured. He was a happy man, at peace withhimself and the world, a good and simple per-son, who often reminded me of the Gospelpromise: »Blessed are the meek, for they shallinherit the earth«. Strubbe felt secure. Moneymeant nothing to him, as he had more thanenough, and his wife Ida owned farms in West-Flanders (where their maids used to come from).After his death his publisher contacted me: theprofessor had never bothered to sign and returnhis royalty statements and had therefore notbeen paid, but what was the publisher to donow – did I know Strubbe’s heirs?

Time meant nothing to him either – the greatauthority on chronology! Most people are theslaves of their watches, but not the professor.One day we students were waiting at 10 a. m. fora lesson on diplomatic, but he did not turn upuntil ten to twelve. All that time we could see himin the building across – the philological depart-ment – in deep discussion and oblivious of time.Eventually he arrived and taught us till 1 p. m.

Neither did people in authority and officialhonours mean anything to him. One day whenthe Editorial Committee of The Legal HistoryReview was meeting in my house, I congratu-lated Strubbe on his election to the Royal His-torical Commission in Brussels – a real honour. Itturned out that he had not said a word about itto Ida, who expressed her displeasure about thisomission. The professor led his own life andwent his own way. He protected his free timeby various – sometimes devious – ways. He thusmaintained that he had no telephone and whenhe rang people up, he said he was ringing fromthe central post office of Bruges. In fact he had atelephone at home, but it was registered in thename of his brother-in-law – a well kept secret.

After lunch he liked having a nap in hisoffice in the Law Faculty and told his secretarythat on no account was he to be disturbed. Butone afternoon Strubbe was urgently needed, as amember of the jury, for the public defence of adoctorate, and failed to turn up. Everyone waswaiting and the dean of the Faculty was gettingnervous. He had no clue where the missingprofessor could be contacted, until I (who knew)decided that in this emergency Strubbe had to beawakened and I told his secretary. Soon after-wards, somewhat dishevelled, he hurriedly ar-rived and the proceedings could start.

Strubbe worked hard and with great con-centration, so he rightly avoided all possibledistraction. He had, for example, his own wayof dealing with the mail (of which he receivedvast quantities). Indeed, as we read in the His-tory of the Bruges Bar, it was known that»Strubbe kept his correspondence in two piles,one marked ›urgent‹ and the other ›not urgent‹.The ›not urgent‹ pile disappeared after a whilefrom his desk into the wastepaper basket, whilethe ›urgent‹ moved up to the ›non urgent‹«.26

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25 See his bibliography in Eg. I.Strubbe, De luister van ons ouderecht. Verzamelde rechtshistori-sche studies, Brussels 1973, 627–638.

26 A. Van den Abeele, De balie vanBrugge, Bruges 2008, 67.

His philosophy was that »most problems sortthemselves out after a while, so why bother?«Telegrams and express-letters were put into oneof his pockets, ready to he considered eventually.This was all well and good until disaster almoststruck. One day a friend of his, who worked forthe Inland Revenue, came to warn him thatunless he paid his taxes the bailiff would arriveand proceed to a confiscation. The professorhad not bothered to fill in his declarations (theywere in the waste paper basket), so he had beentaxed ex officio. One morning I was reading inmy room in the Faculty of Letters, which wasnext to Strubbe’s, when two distinguished look-ing gentlemen from the Law Faculty of Leidenwanted to see me. Their problem was that theirFaculty had decided to grant my learned neigh-bour an honorary degree, but he had neverreplied to their letters. What was his problemand could I help? I explained what happened toStrubbe’s mail, was convinced that he would bedelighted and advised them to write to Mrs.Strubbe, a most careful person, who would dowhat was necessary. Strubbe accepted the hon-our, but not without some hesitation because ofhis aversion to being in the limelight, and wentto Leiden. The ceremony was a great success,but an even greater success was the evening hespent with the students: he made such an amus-ing and warm speech that they gave him astanding ovation.

Strubbe’s agreeable personality had much todo with his sunny youth in a large, prosperousand respected family in beautiful Bruges. Hisfather was a successful businessman and politi-cian, member of the Town Council and of theBelgian Parliament and one of the founders ofthe Port Authority of Zeebrugge, aimed at reviv-ing Bruges’s ancient maritime aspirations. Mylearned colleague was born, lived and died in his

home town, and even in the same parish: he wasbaptized in the St. Gillis church, where hisfuneral also took place, close to his large, earlynineteenth-century house in the St. Gilliskerk-straat.

Strubbe, whose marriage was childless, lov-ed children for whom he always carried a supplyof sweets in his pockets. He smoked a pipe andwhen I had driven him to Leiden, the car was sofull of tobacco that my children could smell it fordays afterwards. On one occasion my wife andI were invited to his house in Bruges, where hetook our children to the May Fair to buy themtoys. When they returned to Strubbe’s garden,the children were taken aback by a little old manwith a pipe who was looking over the gardenwall. It was, however, not a nosy neighbour but astatuette which Strubbe had bought and putthere to surprise and amuse our kids.

The professor also liked his students andthey felt that. He would not be ironic, let alonesarcastic at their expense. On one occasion,however, he could not help it. Strubbe, whotaught a course on the history of historiography,asked a student what he knew about Voltaire.The boy replied that he did not like to talk abouta man who had worked against his own countryduring the First World War and had to flee toSwitzerland, clearly confounding Voltaire withthe pro-German French author and pacifist Ro-main Rolland, author of Au-dessus de la mêléeof 1915. The dumbfounded examiner exclaimedthat »he had learnt something new«. Some timelater the boy’s father came to see him, expressingamazement that his son had failed after such agood examination, and when Strubbe main-tained the contrary, the father objected »but,professor, you even admitted that my son hadtold you something you did not know!«. ButStrubbe himself was also capable of surprising

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pronouncements. Thus he told my wife, who isEnglish, that English was but badly pronouncedBrugs (the Bruges dialect of the Dutch language),for which the justification was slender, althoughnot altogether absent.

His practice as a barrister had taught himsome practical subterfuges, which turned upfrom time to time. At some defence of a doctor-ate he asked a few questions from some slips andthen declared, pointing at a whole pile of them,that he would refrain from the other questionson the slips to save time. However, I then dis-covered that all those slips were blank.

Older people who remember him alwaysrefer to his absentmindedness, which was realenough, even if he sometimes feigned it as adefence-mechanism. Two examples should besufficient here. During the brief period thatStrubbe drove a car (he almost invariably usedhis strong old bicycle, bought with his firstadvocate’s fee), he went to Lille with his wifeto do some research in the Archives Départe-mentales du Nord. Egied went there, while Idadid some shopping and they met on the terraceof a café for tea. Suddenly the learned manremembered a detail in some charter that hewanted to go and check, leaving Ida behind fora while. But what he found was so intriguingthat he drove straight home to confirm his sus-picion. Later that evening the maid asked whathe wanted for supper, to which he replied: »askmy wife«. »But she left for Lille with you thismorning!« So, off went Strubbe back to Lille tofind his wife, patient and understanding, stillwaiting on the terrace.

On another occasion it was rumoured thatthe learned barrister, fetched from behind hismedieval charters, turned up out of breath atthe law court just in time to hear the conclusionof a colleague. In his haste he told the judge that

he was in full agreement, too late to realize thathis colleague was the advocate of the opponentof Strubbe’s client, who duly lost his case. On yetanother occasion Strubbe had invited ProfessorPeter Stein to lecture in Ghent. He had preparedeverything: posters announcing the lecture for aThursday at 11 a. m., messages to colleagues andadvanced students. The lecture hall was bookedand the usual arrangements made for the speak-er’s honorarium. We all were full of expectation,when a few days before the great day I happenedto be in Brussels where I saw a poster announ-cing a lecture in Brussels by Professor Peter Steinon the very day and hour he was supposed to bein Ghent. Something had seriously gone wrongand when I asked my learned (and absentminded) friend about it, he was full of confusion:he had arranged everything, except telling theguest lecturer when he was expected to speak!The oversight was irreparable, as Prof. Stein(unlike some characters in Henri-Lévy-Bruhl’sMentalité primitive) could not be in two differentplaces at the same time.

That Egied Strubbe was all goodness andfriendliness was true enough, but there was alsoa steely side to his character. He could not havetaken on the painstaking work on the 550 pagesof his Chronologie, with its endless lists ofprinces and bishops and its meticulous analysisof the medieval calendar, without will power andself control. He sometimes took a firm stand onmatters of principle. When in 1960 Dr. M. Gys-seling presented his Toponymisch Woordenboekas a dissertation for his habilitation, Strubbeobjected that a dictionary was unacceptable,being a reference work and a compilation. Hestood his ground, but was overruled by theFaculty (with some bad feeling as a conse-quence). He occasionally could be sharp whenhis self esteem was wounded. In those days the

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examiners were paid per student and they eachdeclared upon their word how many exams theycould account for, so when a younger colleaguesuggested a mechanism to check those declara-tions, Strubbe became very angry at what he sawas a slur on his honesty. Also we were told thatwhen the professor served from 1944 to 1946 aspublic prosecutor in the military courts that dealtwith cases of collaboration, he could be quitesevere. Thus he demanded the death penaltyagainst Cyriel Verschaeve, a cleric who was aconvinced nazi-supporter and who was dulysentenced in absentia (he died a few years laterin exile in Austria).

Whereas Strubbe’s main work concernedFlanders and Brabant, his scholarly interestswere truly international. He had numerousDutch friends, such as the famous professorE. M. Meyers, who already in 1932 praisedhim highly. He worked hard with Dutch col-leagues on the calendar of the Great Council ofMechelen. He had numerous contacts in Franceand was active on the Committee that launchedthe vast enterprise of the edition of the LibriProcuratorum of the University of Orléans. I stillremember our trip to that city to meet the rectorof the reborn University there, when my absent-minded colleague boarded the wrong train, sothat we almost missed our appointment.

Strubbe also worked on Philip Wielant andJoost De Damhouder, whose Latin treatise onprocedure became a household name fromCoimbra to Cracow (already in 1930 he hadpublished an article on Damhouder in a Polishperiodical).27 And above all I should mention hisactive role on the Editorial Committee of theBelgian-Dutch Legal History Review, which is atruly international organ, containing contribu-tions from scholars in numerous countries andseveral continents. Finally I mention Strubbe’s

leading role on the Committee that supervisedthe edition of the twelfth-century Liber Floridusand devoted an international colloquium to itsstudy.

Egied Strubbe kept his interest in legal his-tory right up to the end. I remember visiting himin his home a few days before his death, when wediscussed the borough-charters of the FlemishCount Philip of Alsace.

Hans Thieme (1906–2000), eminent legalhistorian and professor who, after studying Lawin Basel, Munich, Berlin and Leipzig, obtainedhis doctorate in Law in this latter city in 1929and, in 1931, his habilitation in Frankfurt underFranz Beyerle. Became ordinary professor first inBreslau in 1938 and then, in 1940, in Leipzig.After the war, when he had served in the Germanarmy as an officer and ended in a British prisonerof war camp, he left Leipzig for the GermanFederal Republic to become, in 1946, professorat Göttingen and, in 1953, after a researchsemester in Basel in 1946–47, in Freiburg imBresgau, where he stayed till his retirement in1974 and where, in 1960–61, he was rector.

Thieme’s scholarly output was considerable,but not so much in textbooks or monographs asin – sometimes lengthy – articles. He worked onGerman medieval and modern history, on Euro-pean humanism, codification and the School ofnatural law. For more then twenty years he wasan editor of the Savigny Zeitschrift.

His articles were conveniently gathered involumes of collected studies. I refer here to thetwo volumes, of 1411 pages, of his GesammelteSchriften of 1986, published under the titleIdeengeschichte und Rechtsgeschichte, whichaptly reflected his vision of legal history as abranch of intellectual history (but he was notinterested in theory or philosophy).

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27 Die Stellung Damhouders in derRechtswissenschaft. Wielant-deDamhouder, in: Zeitschrift fürRechtsgeschichte, Lwow 1930,219–226.

After the war Hans Thieme acted as a cul-tural ambassador of his country, which was keenon being readmitted into the comitas nationum.He was active on the board of the Société JeanBodin and the Association Internationale d’His-toire du Droit and he gave guest-lectures inseveral countries in German, French and English.

The professor’s achievements earned himhonorary degrees in Granada, Montpellier, Parisand Basel. In 1977 a collection of Rechtshistori-sche Studien »on his seventieth birthday« waspublished, with a bibliography by J. Winter, andin 1986 a Festschrift was edited on his eight-ieth birthday by Karl Kroeschell, who had alsoedited, in 1983, the papers of a colloquium heldin 1981 on the occasion of Thieme’s seventy-fifth birthday under the title Gerichtslauben-Vorträge.28

I knew Hans Thieme very well. We weretogether in Jean Bodin and in the Institute atFrankfurt. We met at conferences and he came toGhent: his conversation was stimulating andinformative. Our families became real friends:my wife arranged trips to English families for theThieme children, and their parents lent us theirhouse in Speicher for a Swiss holiday. On oneoccasion Ursel lent us money when we foundourselves without enough cash at the ticket officeof the opera in Vienna, where we were attendinga Jean Bodin conference.

Hans Thieme was a short, talkative andconscientious man, who understandably tookhis Protestant religion very seriously as his fatherwas a Professor in Theology at Leipzig Univer-sity. Hans had life-long connections with Swit-zerland and particularly with Basel where hismother, Jenny Respinger, was born: he publishedstudies on Zasius, Amerbach and Althusius.

Hans Thieme’s wife, Ursel, to whom he wasmarried for sixty years, was also a lawyer and

came from Kulm in West-Prussia. She was a cou-rageous woman who towards the end of the warwalked with her children and a perambulator allthe way from Stettin to Switzerland and safety.

On one occasion she disciplined her learnedhusband who, encouraged by excellent chianti,was in an exuberant mood. It was at a barbe-cue at Impruneta during an excursion from theconference commemorating Accursius, who hadbeen born there. Here Hans felt inspired to standon a table and tried to tell his fellow-legal his-torians about some adventure at the easternfront, where he narrowly missed being killedby a Russian bullet, when Ursel sternly said:»Hans, that will be enough«, cutting short whatpromised to be an entertaining story.

Walter Ullmann (1910–1983) was an Aus-trian jurist, who fled to England in 1938 andbecame a professor at Cambridge University.He wrote books on medieval Roman and canonlaw, the medieval papacy and political thought,and on Carolingian kingship. I met him in 1968,when he was Professor of Medieval Ecclesias-tical Institutions and Fellow of Trinity Collegein Cambridge. He had organized the financesfor my visiting professorship in the HistoryDepartment and we became life-long friends. Ihad numerous conversations with him in hisroom in Trinity, in English and on scholarlytopics, but occasionally we had dinner in theGarden House hotel, where we talked German.He then told stories about his days in InnsbruckUniversity and took great pleasure in recountingstudent pranks and imitating his quirky profes-sors. He clearly relished these impromptu con-versations in his mother tongue. He was andremained a continental scholar. Although almostall his work was published in English, the Ger-man background often came through. I remem-

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28 See A. Laufs, Nachruf auf HansThieme, in: Savigny Zeitschrift fürRechtsgeschichte119,G. A. (2002)15–26. See the bibliography inhttp://c-nb.info/ghd/11862198X,in Katalog der deutschen Natio-nalbibliothek.

ber reading to my wife the long first lines of oneof his studies and being struck by the involvedand lengthy phrase which, although written inEnglish, had obviously been conceived and for-mulated in the author’s continental language.Nor was this remarkable, if one realizes thatwhen Walter first met W. W. Buckland in Cam-bridge, they conversed in Latin, neither of themknowing the other’s mother tongue. Even inEngland Walter remained, as Elizabeth, his wife,put it, a continental scholar so that his life was»a tale of two cultures«.29

In conversation Walter was an exuberantborn teacher and quick to see the funny side ofthings; which again was out of step with thetraditional English reserve: he was, even aftermany years in Cambridge, still an outsider atheart, but he loved his new fatherland and stoodin awe of its leading figures. He was greatlyimpressed by the master of his college, the im-posing and very large Lord Butler, and adored thewhisky served by Lady Butler in their privateapartments after dinner. Rab Butler, by the way,who had been an eminent Conservative politi-cian, could be very entertaining. One evening,after dinner in Trinity, I asked him about hisambitions. »My earliest ambition, he replied,was to be the first President of the British Repub-lic«. As this was clearly a pipedream, he wouldhave liked to be Governor-General of Australia,enjoying a viceregal status as the queen’s repre-sentative. When this ambition failed to materi-alize he had to be content with the mastership ofTrinity.

Walter’s love of ideas was notorious: heexpounded and discussed them with infectiousenthusiasm. It is no coincidence that the wordsidea, thought or ideology appear – right from thestart in 1946 – in no less than five of his books(theory and principles appear in two more). This

struck me as another un-English predilection,as English academic historians tend to distrustideas and abstract constructions, preferring tostick to the well-established facts which are»more venerable than the Lord Mayor«. As hiswidow notes: »Some intelligences will stand onlyfor the facts, and be always distrustful of (or at aloss with) the theory; others will normally prefertheory to fact«.30 Walter had no patience withcolleagues who spent their time on factual detailand minutiae: he could be heard to mutter about»small ideas«. In the same vein he was critical,for example, of Stephen Kuttner who, he felt,spent too much time on tracing manuscripts andcompiling catalogues, instead of writing the cre-ative monographs of which this eminent scholarcertainly was capable.

Like many learned men Walter was un-worldly and naive, which made him very teasible.When in 1968 there was a small student demon-stration in the Senate House in Cambridge andLord Adrian, the Vice-Chancellor, asked twoproctor’s attendants to »escort these gentlemenout«, Walter wanted to know what the studentshad shouted. When we told him: »student powerin, Middle Ages out!« he fell into the trap andwas really upset. He could see great fun in smallthings. When in 1968 Monique Vleeschouwers,née Van Melkebeek, from Ghent, who laterbecame a professor there, studied under him onher work on bishop’s officials, he pronouncedher name as »Flea Showers« and was greatlyamused by the vision of showers of fleas, till Iexplained that Vleeschouwers could be literallyrendered in German as Fleisch-hauer (cf. Fleisch-bursche or Fleischesser), i. e. butcher, a very pro-saic name.

I do not remember discussing politics withWalter, who was a conservative Catholic, whoseJewish ancestors had converted to Christianity,

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29 E. Ullmann, Walter Ullmann. ATale of Two Cultures, Cambridge,1990.

30 E. Ullmann (n. 29) 72.

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a lineage of which he seemed proud. Althoughuniversally known as a most friendly man, Wal-ter did make enemies. Beryl Smalley, the Oxfordspecialist of the medieval Bible, was one of them.She spoke of Walter in a tone that took me abackby its sheer virulence, all the more so since Inever knew what caused the rift. Walter alsocould write acerbic book reviews, in such sharpwords that some personal animosity may havebeen involved.

Except for economic history there were fewperiods or aspects of medieval life with whichWalter was unfamiliar. So, when I stressed hislove of ideas, this did in no way detract from hisknowledge of the facts and the sources. Theamazing thing was that he had a degree in Lawbut not in History: in the latter discipline he wasa self made man, who turned himself into one ofthe proverbial monstra eruditionis or »remorse-lessly erudite scholars« (D. Ibbetson) of his time.

That chance played a large part in Walter’seventful life comes as no surprise. One exampleshould suffice here. On a surreptitious trip toVienna in 1938 Walter, who was in hiding,»bought a copy of The Times, where he foundthat a certain D. Daube had been elected into afellowship at Caius College, Cambridge« with anote attached »that he came from Freiburg. i. B.and had written on the Lex Aquilia«. So Walterwrote to Daube for help, and received an encour-aging reply about the research facilities in Cam-bridge.31 As a footnote to all this I can heremention that my old friend Professor PhilipGrierson, himself a fellow of Caius, had beeninstrumental, as he told me himself, in bringingthe (later famous) David Daube (of All Souls)from Germany to safety in England.

One moving aspect of Walter’s personalitywas that he was constantly troubled by thethought that his widow might not be financially

safe. That he felt so worried in spite of theroyalties of his books reflected no doubt theexistential uncertainty caused by the traumaticevents of 1938, which left a lifelong scar.32

Guido van Dievoet (1924–2008), eminentlegal historian and professor. Studied Law andHistory in Leuven, his native town, where heobtained his doctorate in Law in 1947 andbecame a licentiate in History in 1948. Hishabilitation followed in 1951. From 1947 to1956 he was a barrister in Leuven, but alreadyin 1947 he entered academic life there as assis-tant to Professor Zeger van Hee. His appoint-ment as ordinary professor followed in 1957. Hetaught, until his retirement in 1990, a variety ofLaw courses in five faculties, of Economics,Letters, Applied Sciences, Social Sciences and,of course, Law.

As a legal historian he worked mainly on thelaw and the institutions of Flanders and Brabantduring the Middle Ages and the Ancient Regime.In 1951 he published his thesis on Jehan Boutil-lier, author of the Somme rural, written between1393 and 1396 by a royal official in the Tournaiarea. Boutillier’s lawbook focussed on regionalcustomary law, but contained a fair amount ofRoman and canonical doctrine. It was – both inthe original French version and in the Dutchtranslation – a widely read authority in the LowCountries until the eighteenth century.

Van Dievoet’s model monograph is a de-tailed and original analysis of the Somme, itssources, manuscripts and prints, and contentsand influence.33 Van Dievoet’s research led himto work in the Archives Nationales on the reg-isters of the Parlement of Paris, tracing casesmentioned by Boutillier.34 Van Dievoet took alife-long interest in the sources of legal history:his edition of the customary laws of the Tournai

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31 E. Ullmann (n. 29) 19–20.32 D. Ibbetson, Hermann Kantoro-

wicz (1877–1940) and WalterUllmann (1910–1983), in: J. Beat-son and R. Zimmermann (eds.),Jurists Uprooted. German-speak-ing Emigré-Lawyers in Twentieth-century Britain, Oxford 2004,269–298.

33 Jehan Boutillier en de Somme ru-ral, Leuven 1951.

34 See G. van Dievoet, La Sommerural de Boutillier et la Jurispru-dence du Parlement de Paris, in:Revue du Nord (1974) 115–116.

area appeared two years before his death andfifty-five years after his book on Boutillier andthe law of the same area.35 All this did, of course,not stop him publishing studies on the contentsof the law, both private and public, but thewritings of the old jurists and the texts of theold customs of his country were clearly closest tohis heart.

Van Dievoet devoted a lot of attention, incollaboration with colleagues from the Nether-lands, to the quality of Dutch legal terminology,which is common to Flanders and Holland.36

Boutillier was van Dievoet’s steady com-panion, from the monograph of 1951 to theedition of some extracts from the Somme ruralin the aforementioned Coutumes du Tournaisisof 2006 (pp. 25–31). Nevertheless, van Die-voet’s modern critical edition of the Somme,which we still have to consult in the Paris editionof 1621, never materialized, although he had allthe data at his fingertips and had announced itsimminent completion several times. This was adisappointment to the historians of the LowCountries and, no doubt, to the learned editorhimself. It is possible that he, like Ganshof withhis promised biography of Charlemagne, waitedtoo long to bring this arduous undertaking tofruition – a task that is not likely to be taken onsoon by another scholar. In 2003 van Dievoethimself gave a detailed account of his life andwork in an interview with his colleagues LouisBerkvens and Georges Martyn.37

Guido van Dievoet was very much »our manin Leuven«. He was born there and his father,Emiel van Dievoet, was one of the leading lightsof the Law Faculty from 1918 to 1955, besidesbeing a politician and becoming Minister ofJustice in 1939. In 1967 he was made a baron,which meant that his son Guido bore the title ofjonkheer (esquire).

Professor van Dievoet jr. went to school andto University in Leuven, eventually becoming abusy teacher and administrator there, and deanof the Law Faculty from 1974 to 1978. He spentall his life in his native town and died there athome in his eighty-third year. He travelled forresearch in archives and libraries and for con-gresses but never far from home.

I have met Guido van Dievoet on manyoccasions, at conferences and in the Committeefor Legal History of the Royal Flemish Academyof Sciences. Our most frequent meeting placewas, however, the Belgian Royal Commissionon Ancient Laws, which convened several timesa year in Brussels. Van Dievoet was its assiduoussecretary for many years and felt at home there,as it is devoted to the study and edition ofhistorical sources. In spite of all those encountersI did not manage to really know him personally,possibly because he was reserved to the point ofshyness. He was a discreet and modest man,although he had no reason to be. He will beremembered by his colleagues as an eminentérudit and by his innumerable students as adevoted teacher, who was always ready to helpthem.

Franz Wieacker (1908–1994) was an emi-nent legal historian and professor. He studiedin Freiburg im Breisgau, under Fritz Pringsheimand Otto Lenel, two leading specialists in an-cient Roman law (I met Pringsheim in the earlyfifties in Landshut, during an excursion from aDeutscher Rechtshistorikertag in Munich andwhere he, by then in his seventies, made a bril-liant table-speech). Wieacker’s habilitation tookplace in 1933 and he soon started teaching inLeipzig, where he became ordinary professor in1939. After military service during the SecondWorld War he became, in 1948, professor of

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35 Coutumes du Tournaisis, Brussels2006.

36 See on all this F. Stevens, In Me-moriam Guido van Dievoet, in:Pro Memorie. Bijdragen tot derechtsgeschiedenis der Nederlan-den 10 (2008) 275–278, F. Ste-vens, Bio-bibliografie van Guidovan Dievoet, in: F. Stevens andD. Van den Auweele (eds.),»Houd voet bij stuk«, Xenia Iurishistoriae G. van Dievoet oblata,

Leuven 1990, 23–30 and J. Mon-ballyu, In Memoriam GuidoC. E. van Dievoet, in: The LegalHistory Review 77 (2009) 295–298.

37 Pro Memorie 5 (2003) 227–244.

Roman law and modern legal history in his oldUniversity of Freiburg and, in 1953 and until hisearly retirement in 1973, in Göttingen.

Wieacker’s earliest research was devoted toAntiquity and produced technical studies onaspects of Roman private law. In a followingphase he concentrated on the problems of hisown time, more particularly on property law,where he rejected the liberal notion of untram-melled individual ownership. This was in thethirties when young Wieacker, a German patriotand a socialist, was drawn to national socialismand collaborated, without ever being a party-member, in its plans for a Volksgesetzbuch thatwas to replace the nineteenth-century Bürger-liches Gesetzbuch. After the war, when he was inhis late thirties, Wieacker regretted his dis-credited political past. He could easily have goneback to ancient Rome and found safe refuge inthe arms of Ulpian and Modestinus, but insteadhe threw himself wholeheartedly into the studyof modern Europe. It was in this third phase –having been a Romanist and a contemporaryjurist – that he became a committed historian ofmodern Europe. I am referring, of course, to hisPrivatrechtsgeschichte der Neuzeit, first pub-lished in 1952 and followed by a much enlargededition in 1967. This encyclopaedic book takesthe reader from the revival of the Corpus Iuris inItaly around A. D. 1100 to twentieth-centuryEurope. The work was at once recognized as aclassic and made the author world famous. Itwas translated into English by Tony Weir, a fel-low of Trinity College, Cambridge, who showedreal courage rendering Wieacker’s literary butnot always easy German into fluent English.

The book is truly European and full of ac-curate information, but places the law in a broadcultural context. What makes it into a work ofgenius is the insight into the meaning of past

events. I mention, for example, Wieacker’s de-scription of the three revivals of Roman law inWestern Europe, the first being the jejune earlymedieval phase of Roman Vulgarrecht, the sec-ond the fascination with the Corpus Iuris, newlydiscovered and adored as Gospel, and the thirdthe realization that Roman law was just a pro-duct of history and to be studied as such. It isamusing to read that the 659 pages of the bookwere presented as a Hilfsbuch für das Studium –poor students!

This great European period of Wieacker’smiddle years was followed by a return, in his oldage, to Roman Antiquity. I refer, of course, to hismonumental Römische Rechtsgeschichte, whosefirst volume appeared on the author’s eightiethbirthday. He unfortunately did not live to see thesecond volume through the press, for althoughthe publisher had foreseen its publication by theyear 1992, it was in fact produced posthumouslyin 2006 thanks to J. G. Wolf, U. Manthe andM. Bolten. Official recognition of Wieacker’swork took many forms, such as honorary de-grees in Freiburg, Glasgow and Uppsala.38

I met Wieacker on many occasions, at in-ternational conferences and at the meetings ofthe Wissenschaftliche Beirat in Frankfurt. Healso gave a guest lecture in Ghent. He had awarm, almost juvenile character, a very expres-sive face and was a voluble talker, always fullof ideas. His intellectual curiosity was bound-less, and so was his energy. I particularly re-member our conversation – or rather his priva-tissimum – on the public law of nineteenth-cen-tury Germany. I was astonished that, althoughhe clearly was a privatiste, he was so knowl-edgeable about constitutional problems. He hadan engaging sense of humour and was amusedto find that in France he was known as FranzFiacre. In the summer of 1945 he found himself

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38 See his bibliography on the websiteof the German National Library,http://d-nb.info/gnd/118632345.See the In Memoriam by DieterSimon, in: RechtshistorischesJournal 13 (1994) 1–31 and byOkko Behrends, in: SavignyZeitschrift für RechtsgeschichteR. A. 112 (1995), pp. XIII–LXII.

in a British prisoner of war camp in Italy, wherehe promptly started teaching Roman law in theopen-air-camp-University, eventually becomingdean of its Law Faculty (in the same war JeanGaudemet was lecturing in his own prisoner ofwar camp in Germany – two unstoppable tea-chers!).

Jean Yver (1901–1988), eminent legal his-torian and professor. After studies in Law andHistory in the Faculty of Law and the Faculty ofLetters at Caen, where he was born, Yver ob-tained his doctorate in 1926 and his agrégationin 1928. After a short spell teaching in Lille, hewas, in 1927, back in Caen, where in 1931 hebecame professor and held the chair of Frenchlegal history till his retirement in 1974. He alsotaught from 1927 till 1967 at the Law Faculty ofRouen.

Some of my legal historians shone in theinternational limelight, but Jean Yver was con-tent to teach and live in his native Normandyand to study its history. Numerous books andarticles concerned the duchy in the Middle Agesand the Ancien Régime and in particular itscustomary law. Yver occasionally ventured intobordering areas such as Flanders, Anjou andPoitou, and he also had a lively interest inEnglish history and law. That the ancient duchyproduced William the Bastard and won thevictory of 1066 was a title of glory for the wholeof Normandy, even if the historic duchy is nowreplaced by a number of départements calledafter rivers, the Channel and even after a Spanishgalleon.

Yver was so rooted and so centered on hisnative land that he could be called »insular«, aterm more usually associated with an Englishstate of mind. No wonder therefore that he re-fused calls to teach in Paris. His interest in all

things English presented some peculiar anoma-lies. I discovered, for instance, that although heseemed to have read every English book onoutre-Manche, he did, as he told me himself,not speak the language and visited Albion for thefirst time when he was sixty-five. Another un-expected connection with great Britain was hiscourse on ancient Norman feudal customs, thatwere still applied in the Channel Islands (wherepleading on property was a lucrative line).

Yver had, of course, to go from time to timeto Paris on official business and he occasionallyleft his country to attend congresses of the So-ciété Jean Bodin or the Journées d’Histoire duDroit in Rome in 1938 or a conference in Spoletoin 1968. His eminent services as a scholar andcitizen were duly recognized by a voluminousFestschrift published in 1976 under the titleDroit Privé et Institutions Régionales. Etudeshistoriques offertes à Jean Yver and containinga bibliography of no less than six pages. In 1970he became foreign member of the Royal FlemishAcademy of Sciences in Brussels, and in 1974Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

I knew Yver well and was on friendly termswith him, which was not surprising as the countyof Flanders and the duchy of Normandy wereold neighbours and we shared a common interestin English legal history. I also worked in thearchives and libraries of Normandy, lookingfor information on the English »alien priories«of the abbeys of the Province of Rouen.

I have a vivid memory of Jean Yver as ashort, vivacious man, who was the dynamicPresident of the Société d’Histoire du Droit etdes Institutions des Pays de l’Ouest de la Francefrom its foundation in 1951 onwards. I haveamusing memories of a conference Yver organ-ized in the 1960s and where he invited me, avery young visitor, to chair an afternoon session.

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I was impressed by the honour but slightlyaghast when, looking down on the congressistsfrom my presiding chair, I noticed that most ofthem promptly fell asleep (after a copious mealrounded off with a calvados). I wondered whatwas going to happen when the lecturer finishedhis talk on the Admiralty of Brittany, but to mysurprise the audience at once woke up, ap-plauded and fired questions at the speaker.Had they only shut their eyes while listening orhad they prepared their questions knowing whatthe subject was? At the same conference Yver,who was a shy scholar, worriedly asked me howhe was to introduce the famous Miss HelenCam. »I can’t possibly call her ›miss‹«, he said»for that refers to a girl and this is an eminentlady with a long career behind her«. I told himthat everybody knew her as Miss Cam withoutany problem, but he was not convinced. So Isuggested he call her Professor Helen Cam andhe was pleased and relieved.

At the same congress Helen Cam had had aproblem of her own. She heard French speakerstalking of immunités and wondered what theymeant, but when I referred her to the familiarEnglish franchises, she understood and was sat-isfied.

My wife and I, our two families havingbecome très liées, dined in the Yver’s solidbourgeois home in the rue des Chanoines, wherehe told us about the tragic bombardment in thesummer of 1944, when his then house wasdestroyed with all his books and papers, likemost of the rest of Caen. Jean Yver was instru-mental in rebuilding his city, being appointed in1947 Rapporteur of the official Plan of Recon-struction and Urbanization. Our children alsogot to know each other and my wife and I sadlymissed seeing Jean’s widow who had a house inthe Hohwald in Alsace, where she came from

and where we had hoped to find her while wewere visiting that historic province.

I would now like to mention some legalhistorians I have met, but too briefly to writeabout their personality. I refer to Sam Thorne,the editor of Bracton. I also remember Joüon desLongrais, who lectured at the Ecole Pratique desHautes Etudes in Paris on the sources andliterature of English legal history (my first stepsin that direction). I also met Bruno Paradisi atthe congresses of the Società Italiana di Storiadel Diritto of which he was one of the leadinglights. I also met David Daube at a DeutscherRechtshistorikertag in Munich and again in AllSouls College, shortly before he left Oxfordfor America, and the historian of canon lawHans Erich Feine, whom I encountered at someDeutscher Rechtshistorikertag and whose Kirch-liche Rechtsgeschichte I still find indispensable.I also briefly met Francesco Calasso, who gave amost vivid lecture at a conference in Bologna –he left us, much too soon, in 1964, just ten yearsafter the publication of his excellent Medio Evodel Diritto, which I still often consult. Nor can Iforget the charming but rather taciturn BernardSchnapper, with whom I shared the year of ourbirth and our interest in the history of criminallaw and in the geography of litigiosité andwhom I best knew when he lived near Poitiers,where he had become professor after a career inBordeaux and Paris. I would also like to men-tion two eminent Dutch legal historians withwhom I sat on the Editorial Committee of TheLegal History Review. P. W. A. Immink was ahistorian of public law and had some verypersonal views on the medieval origins of themodern State. Pieter Gerbenzon, who died in2009 at the age of eighty-nine in his belovedItaly, was interested in Frisian antiquities and

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language and in the history of canon law. I alsowas pleased to meet the Australian legal histor-ian, Professor L. J. Downer, who taught in Can-berra and was the editor of that elusive twelfth-century lawbook known as the Leges HenriciPrimi. He and his wife stayed with us in Afsneetowards the end of a long European journey.

Reflections. Why legal history? For centu-ries the law stood between civilized life andchaos. Judges applied the law, scholars ex-pounded it and lawmakers created and adaptedit. There has been high drama and perversion ofthe law by fanatics who tortured and executedso-called witches. Some people have heroicallyfought for it, while others have detested it as abrake on free political action: they got rid of theRechtsstaat and established their own Unrecht-staat, i. e. the unlaw-state.39

Legal historians tell the tale of all thoseendeavours and drama’s in order to satisfy ourcuriosity and to show how our ancestors have,through trial and error, laid the foundations ofthe law as we know it. Legal history also widensour horizons and sharpens our critical sense ofthe rules of our own time.

But who were those legal historians as asociological group? And what motivated them?All my subjects were driven by intellectual curi-osity and tried to find out how previous gener-ations coped with the problem of good govern-ment and harmonious relations among citizens.They realized that the law was not some pre-ordained set of rules dropped from heaven, butthe product of experience. Their starting pointwas not some acute problem of their own daywhich needed elucidation from the past, but theorigins and development of the major systems.Some of my heroes came from law to history,others from history to law, but all studied the law

in a wide context of time and space, and as partof our human destiny. For all of them study andresearch came before they were called upon toteach. They all became university professors: thetime of the learned amateurs – à la HeinrichSchliemann – had long gone. They all had hun-dreds of students, but some enjoyed teachingmore than others and they carried out importantadministrative tasks as heads of institutes ofresearch. They obviously could have chosenother careers – as advocates or magistrates: somemoved from the Bar to the cathedra or combinedtheir professorship with a full-time job as mag-istrates.

Professors are powerless against their polit-ical masters, whether elected legislators or, a for-tiori, dictators, as Hans Frank experienced whenhe lectured during the war on the virtues of theRechtsstaat. That may explain why scholars tendto be loyal and obedient citizens, and not in-clined to go against the dominant trend. They aregenerally politically correct and do not followthe example of Raymond Aron (1906–1983)who disagreed with the left-wing sympathies ofthe Parisian intelligentsia of his time.

Scholars shy away from value judgments:pronouncements about good or evil will seldombe found in their books and articles. Was theBürgerliches Gesetzbuch a good or a bad thingfor the common man and woman? This notunimportant question is not posed in Wieacker’stwenty detailed and profound pages devoted tothis major event of German history in his Priva-trechtsgeschichte der Neuzeit (where we readthat »als fachjuristische Leistung ist das Bürger-liche Gesetzbuch ein Meisterwerk« – a technicalmasterpiece, which is what clearly appeals tolearned jurists).

Some legal historians not only abstainedfrom value judgments, but went so far as to

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39 I prefer this rendering of Unrecht-staat, as unlaw is an Old Englishterm, revived in the nineteenthcentury, according to the NewShorter Oxford English Dictiona-ry on Historical Principles, II,Oxford 1993, 3495.

condemn them in so many words. I refer here towhat Ganshof wrote: »Ce n’est pas à l’histoire,croyons nous, qu’il appartient de juger«. Thiswas in 1941 in his review of de Moreau’s His-toire de l’Eglise en Belgique, and was repeatedin 1952 in his In Memoriam Ferdinand Lot,where he notes that the famous Parisian medi-evalist believed that »distinguer le bien du mal,séparer le faux du vrai est le premier devoir del’historien«, adding, however: »il est permis depenser différemment«.40 This unphilosophicalattitude stems from the positivist approach andthe Quellennähe which gives the reassuring feel-ing of being as close to certainty as possible. Butthere is also the ambition to keep history out ofthe clutches of political ideologues, and we allknow how those in power love to manipulateand rewrite the past: somebody had to presentthe historical truth to the people, who had aright to know wie es eigentlich gewesen, andthat somebody was the unbiassed professionalhistorian.

My legal historians were an heterogeneousbunch. Although most belonged to professionalor academic families, others – such as Plucknett –had no such exalted background. Nor did theybelong to one particular ideological family, astheir spectrum varied from ardent Catholic orProtestant to convinced atheist. And althoughthe key note was liberal-conservative, there weresome socialists among them – and even onenational-socialist (in his young years). None ofthem was active in party-politics, although somewere involved in the process of lawgiving. Kutt-ner was on the committee that drafted the newCodex Iuris Canonici and Wieacker, at the otherend of the spectrum, played a role in the draftingof the Volksgesetzbuch. And Gabriel Le Brasplayed a minor role in French ecclesiastical pol-itics. All my heroes were good patriots, quite a

few of them serving the fatherland on the battle-field (and spending some time in a P. O. W.camp). As scholars, however, they tended to lookbeyond their national frontiers, some were trulycosmopolitan and had world history as theirplaying field. In the latter camp we find Dekkersand Gilissen, whereas Strubbe, van Dievoet andYver preferred to work on their home ground.Gaudemet and Wieacker were rooted in theirnational past, but went well beyond it, intoAntiquity and the Church or into the Europeantheatre. The work of canonists such as Ullmannwas ratione materiae international.

The majority of my learned colleagues weremedievalists. Even Wieacker, more at home inancient Roman and modern Europe, devoted anextensive chapter of almost 100 pages to themedieval origins of the ius commune in thesecond edition (1967) of his classic Europeansurvey. Why did they spend so much time andenergy on that age of notorious ignorance andsuperstition, when people believed the earth tobe flat and knew so abysmally little about theirown anatomy? The answer is that all ages were,of course, ignorant of the discoveries and inven-tions that had not yet been made. Our medievalancestors were indeed ignorant of many things,but so were the great scholars of the nineteenthcentury, who had never heard of telephones orradios and were ignorant of some elementaryrules of hygiene.

The medieval period, moreover, was a mostcreative time, when the English common law aswell as the ius commune, still of fundamentalimportance in the present world, were founded.It was then also that our »ignorant« forebearsfounded the universities, the nation states, theparliaments, the constitutions and the basic ideaof the Rechtsstaat – all innovations that are stillhappily with us.

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40 See on all this R. C. van Caene-gem, In Memoriam F. L. Ganshof,in: Koninklijke Academie voorWetenschappen, Letteren enSchone Kunsten van België, Jaar-boek 1980, 235.

I said that my heroes were a heterogeneousgroup of people. In one respect, however, theywere homogenous: they were all »dead whitemales«. The two female legal historians in myrecollection – Helen Cam and Marie TheresFögen – were eminent scholars, but I met themonly too briefly to try to make an attempt atcharacterization. Why were they so few, andwhy, even to-day, when some outstanding wom-en work in our field, are they still rarae nantes ingurgite vasto? See, for example, the editorialcommittees of the Savigny Zeitschrift and TheLegal History Review. Answering this questionwill be much more difficult than posing it, but itis noteworthy that female lawyers tend to preferentering the professions rather than undertakingyears of research for a doctorate.

Were my colleagues’ endless hours of teach-ing and writing worth while? What was theimpact of their labours on society? The answeris that the scholars’ influence was indirect. Theirstudents, to whom they gave insight in theprocess of making and applying laws, becamepoliticians, judges and barristers. The educatedpublic came to understand how law and societyhad developed and what experiments had suc-ceeded or failed. Societies do sometimes drawlessons from the past, as individuals learnthrough experience. Even though, in a sombremood, we may get the impression that »peoplenever learn« and that »history repeats itself«(and its errors), there are cases where past expe-rience has led to better laws. I mention, as oneexample, the French criminal procedure of theearly nineteenth century, which resulted from adeliberate attempt to read the history of theAncient Regime and of the revolutionary inno-vations, in order to combine the best of the two

systems. In the same vein the constitutions ofGreat Britain and the United States of Americahave inspired constitutional lawgivers on theContinent of Europe in the nineteenth and twen-tieth centuries.

My legal historians were no systembuildersand did not look for »universal laws of history«– even though René Dekkers wrote some inter-esting pages about universal trends and recur-rences. Nor were their books controversial, asthey were careful to establish facts – about whichthere could be little dissension – rather thanprovocative ideas and interpretations, let aloneblueprints for improving mankind.

I sometimes wonder who of my learnedauthors were the most inspiring, in other words,with whom would one like to spend a day on adesert island? It would, of course, depend onone’s expectations. If one hoped for agreeable aswell as interesting company, the name of Strubbewould come to mind. If one wanted a lively andenlightening privatissimum on nineteenth-cen-tury Germany, Wieacker would be a good choice.If a firework of ideas and critical comments,Walter Ullmann would fit the bill, and if amusinganecdotes, striking one liners and exquisite lan-guage were desired, Gabriel Le Bras would fulfilone’s wishes. If, on the contrary, one felt in needof exciting revolutionary pronouncements, noneof my learned colleagues would stand a chance.But that they all were honest men who strove toestablish the historical truth and thus to enlight-en their students and fellow citizens is beyonddoubt – a fitting conclusion for my series ofportraits.

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252 Raoul C. van Caenegem

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