ABSTRACT
Customary law had been known to the Romans, for they dealt with many primitive peoples who determined social penalties in a gathering of elders where a king or priest acted as the mouthpiece of tradition. The barbarian kings were obviously less effective rulers in many ways than the emperors, of whom Roman jurists taught that ‘their will has the force of law’. The power of the pope as an arbiter in matters of Church organization and discipline was reflected in the growing coherence of Canon law: the law of the Church. Concubinage and open marriage seem to have been most common during the tenth and eleventh centuries in Italy and Germany, though priests with regular or irregular consorts were found in every part of western Christendom, while perhaps the worst examples of father being followed by son in a Church office come from the Breton dioceses of Quimper and Nantes, where the bishoprics themselves were thus transmitted.
