ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the precise legal status of the category 'enmity' and to venture a very few speculations about the possible wider implications of this medieval legal institution. In modern times new legal relationships between individuals are usually created by signatures on specially designed pieces of paper; in the middle Ages by public rituals. The low-level generalized hostilities of the medieval period became the devastating and chronologically distinct 'wars' of modern times. Thus there were rulings that commanded that enmity should be announced by a public defiance, and that a three-day truce should then follow before actual hostilities commenced. Medieval canon law is founded on bedrock of Roman law. Sometimes the borrowing is wholesale and explicit, as in the case of the early Church councils which ruled, whoever is debarred from making an accusation by public laws. By the thirteenth century the interpenetration of laws was very far advanced and a common procedural law.
