Vacarius

Who was Vacarius?

Roger Vacarius was an Italian authority in civil and Canon law, who became the first known teacher of Roman law in England.

Apparently educated in Bologna, he was brought to Canterbury, possibly by Thomas Becket, to serve as counsel to the Archbishop of Canterbury Theobald of Bec, in his struggle with Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester. The case ended favorably for Theobald in 1146. Vacarius next surfaces in 1149 in Oxford University, where he taught to crowds of both rich and poor. For the latter, he prepared a nine-volume compendium of the Codex Justinianus. Said, if mastered, to resolve all of the legal questions commonly debated in the schools, it became a leading text-book in the emerging university. Often described as the Liber pauperum, the book gave rise to the nickname pauperistae for students of law in Oxford. Nearly complete manuscripts of this work survive in the cathedral libraries at Worcester and Prague and in the town library at Bruges. Fragments can be found in Oxford's Bodleian Library and in several of the college libraries there.

Despite its popularity, the new legal texts were not without opposition. King Stephen of England, brother of Henry of Blois, silenced Vacarius, and ordered the destruction of the books of civil and canon law that Theobald had brought over from Italy with Vacarius. This royal edict seems to have been abandoned, however, after Stephen's death in 1154, and evidence suggests that civil law was soon again a favorite subject at Oxford. By 1190 two students from Friesland divided the evening between them to make a copy of the Liber pauperum.