ABSTRACT
Prior to the codification of the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church with the publication of the 1917 Code of Canon Law, Roman Catholic canon law continued in all its pre-Reformation complexity. The first major source of additional ecclesiastical laws after the Reformation was the Council of Trent in the mid sixteenth century. New law emanating from the Council was added to the published compendium of pre-tridentine law (published in its most accurate form by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582) and supplemented by Papal Bulls and other pronouncements in subsequent centuries. The complexity of the law was such that French bishops at the First Vatican Council (1870) complained that they were ‘weighed down by law’.1
