Definition
The Liber Feudorum (also called Libri Feudorum, or "Book of Feuds") is a medieval compilation of feudal law that served as the primary written authority on the law of fiefs in medieval Europe. Originally assembled in northern Italy and associated with the legal scholars of the Lombard tradition, the collection organized the customary rules governing the tenure, transfer, inheritance, and obligations of feudal land holdings. The work is sometimes described as consisting of two books — hence Burrill's correction to the plural Libri Feudorum — and was eventually glossed and incorporated into the study of Roman law at Bologna, where civilian jurists treated it as a quasi-authoritative supplement to Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter the Liber Feudorum primarily in two contexts: the history of property law and the intellectual history of medieval jurisprudence. Because the text was absorbed into the civilian legal curriculum alongside Roman law, later writers on feudal tenure — including English common lawyers writing about copyhold, villeinage, and knight service — often cite or paraphrase its principles without naming it directly. A researcher tracing the doctrinal origins of concepts like escheat, relief, wardship, or the distinction between allodial and feudal ownership may find that a chain of authority runs back through continental civilian commentary to this source.
The historical legal dictionaries are sparse here. Black's entry is incomplete as transmitted. Rapalje & Lawrence attribute the compilation to Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and date it to 1170, which is a conventional attribution but one that modern legal historians treat with caution — the text evolved through multiple recensions and was probably not a single imperial enactment. Researchers relying on the Rapalje & Lawrence entry as a precise historical fact should verify against dedicated scholarship on the Lombard feudists.
The term itself appears infrequently in English case law but surfaces regularly in treatises on real property, particularly those written between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries when common lawyers regularly drew on civilian and feudal learning to explain the historical foundations of English tenure. Works by Spelman, Craig, Dalrymple (Lord Hailes), and later writers on feudal tenure cite the Lombard collection as foundational. Encountering a treatise reference to "the feudists," "the Lombard custom," or "the Book of Feuds" is almost always a reference to this source or to its major commentators (Cujas, Hotman, and others).
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries agree on the essential identity of the Liber Feudorum as a foundational feudal law text but diverge in detail and precision.
Rapalje & Lawrence offer the most specific historical framing, crediting Frederick Barbarossa and the date 1170, and citing Wharton as their authority. This attribution reflects the dominant nineteenth-century understanding, though it flattens a more complicated textual history. The collection was likely compiled from Lombard customary rules over time and later systematized, rather than issued as a single legislative act.
Burrill makes the important bibliographic point that "properly" the title is plural — Libri Feudorum — because the work consists of two books. This is a correction worth noting for researchers searching catalog records or footnotes, where both singular and plural forms appear. Burrill also directs readers to the entry "Feudorum Libri," indicating that his dictionary's primary treatment appears under that heading rather than the Latin inversion used here.
Black's entry, as transmitted, is fragmentary and adds little independent information.
None of the three dictionaries address the text's relationship to the Bolognese glossators, its incorporation into printed editions of Roman law, or the role of humanist jurists in later critical editions — gaps that matter to a researcher tracing the text's influence on early modern legal thought.
Jurisdictional Note
The Liber Feudorum had no direct authority in English common law courts, but its principles permeated English feudal tenure doctrine through the medium of learned treatises and civilian-trained lawyers. Scottish law, with its more pronounced civilian inheritance, engaged the text more directly. Continental European legal systems in the civil law tradition treated it as part of the received legal learning through at least the early modern period.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Feudal Tenure; History of Real Property Law; Reception of Roman Law in Medieval Europe.