Towards Conflict

This chapter goes to the heart of the clash between the political culture of the communal citizen and the political cultures of the countryside. The process of reinterpretation of reality that the doctores pursued on the basis of learned law made it possible for the communes to reformulate political bonds in rural areas. The challenge that the commune threw down to the lordly powers of the countryside was then to reformulate their own traditional prerogatives of dominion through the new juridical language, in order to find a collocation within that general ordo (hierarchy) of authorities that placed the emperor at the summit and the communes immediately below him. For those powers that had their own roots in other cultural backgrounds, judicial scissors inexorably cut down the spaces available for claim-making, as is clearly shown by the trials that took place in urban courts against the lords of the countryside.