Reason, conscience and equity: bishops as the king's judges in later Medieval England

It has long been recognized that many late medieval bishops were heavily involved in secular government. Scholars have tended to characterize these activities in fairly general terms, labelling those who chose to serve the crown as ‘administrators’, ‘bureaucrats’ or ‘civil servants’. In fact, they are better described as king’s judges, for a large part of what bishops did in government was dispensing justice in the king’s name. The first part of this article explores the contexts of this judicial activity, showing that bishops were especially active in institutions such as parliament, chancery and the council which offered justice to the king’s subjects on a discretionary basis. Discretionary justice was closely informed by the precepts of natural law, which in turn derived authority from the abstract notion of the divine will. The second half of the article suggests that the strong theological underpinning of discretionary justice meant that bishops’ involvement in secular government did not stand in opposition to their spiritual vocation or their role as leaders of the church. I argue that the sweeping and rather disparaging contemporary and modern characterizations of ‘civil-servant’ bishops as self-serving careerists ought to be replaced by a more nuanced understanding of the rationale and motivation of those senior clergymen who involved themselves in secular governance

Magnetic Structure Investigations at the Nuclear Center

The magnetic structure of the compounds UOS, ß-CoSO4, YCO5, and HoCO5 is briefly described. UOS is antiferromagnetic. The Néel temperature is Tn=55°K. The magnetic cell is doubled in the c direction with a ++ - - sequence of U moments along c. The apparent spin is S∼1. The negative interaction corresponds to U-O-U links. In ß-CoSO4 (high-temperature modification, space group Pbnm), Co atoms are in 000, 00½, ½½½, ½½0. Here three different antiferromagnetic spin modes, mutually perpendicular, Ax(+ - - +), Gy(+-+-), and Cz(++ - - ), in the Wollan-Koehler notation, are coupled. Direction cosines are 0.71, 0.50, and 0.50, respectively. The Co moment is about 3,84 µB at 4.2°K. A field-induced spin flip to the configuration Fx, Cy, Gz is predicted. YCO5 is ferromagnetic at room temperature with a moment value of Co practically equal to that of metallic Co and moment direction along c, which is conserved down to 4.2°K. In HoCO5 the moment of Ho is opposite to those of the Co atoms. When cooling from room to liquid helium temperature, the direction of easy magnetization changes from near c to a direction in the basal plane and the Ho moment increases from 4 to about 9 µB. The compensation temperature is 70°K

Medieval universities, legal institutions, and the commercial revolution

We present new data documenting medieval Europe’s Commercial Revolution using information on the establishment of markets in Germany. We use these data to test whether medieval universities played a causal role in expanding economic activity, examining the foundation of Germany’s first universities after 1386 following the papal schism. We find that the trend rate of market establishment breaks upward in 1386 and this break is greatest where the distance to a university shrank most. There is no differential pre-1386 trend associated with the reduction in distance to a university, and there is no break in trend in 1386 where university proximity did not change. These results are robust to estimating a variety of specifications that address concerns about the endogeneity of university location. Universities provided training in newly rediscovered Roman and canon law; students with legal training served in positions that reduced the uncertainty of trade in the Middle Ages. We argue that training in the law, and the consequent development of legal and administrative institutions, was an important channel linking universities and greater economic activity in medieval Germany