The High Middle Ages, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. – was the beginning of the period of the flowering of the urban system in Europe. This phenomenon was universal, and the differences related only to the degree of spread of urban life, the number and size of new cities in the state, their socio-political relations with the royal power. In the course of two-three centuries cities became not only political and cultural, but also economic and social centers of states that opposed feudalism to a certain extent. The urban population constituted a special class category, which only at first was fully integrated into the feudal hierarchy. The medieval town was a very special social organism, whose independence increased the more significant were the wealth and social weight of the town’s community of residents.
The peculiarity of the status of the medieval town was a continuation of the conditions of its formation in the system of feudal relations. The original urban settlement was a community which was under the feudal power of a lord, a clergyman or a sovereign duke. The lord, interested in strengthening the town on his land, granted some privileges to the community in a special charter, or charters. The history of cities as independent social units began with the issuance of such charters. The first charters were given to cities from the end of XI century in France (Cambré – 1076, Amiens – 1084, etc.), in Germany – at the turn of XI – XII centuries. Such acts were usually of two varieties. In one of them a city was released from feudal duties (military, right of “dead hand”) and freedoms (choice of residence and occupation, right to marry without a lienor permission), but some general feudal duties of a city as a whole were established. In others, the exemption from feudal duties was supplemented by the right to essentially legal autonomy (including its own criminal and civil jurisdiction). The legal secession of the city was inseparable from the emergence of urban self-government.
This legal detachment of cities became the basis for the development of their own urban law, under which the members of the urban community lived and to which the entire organization of urban life was subordinated. Due to the peculiarities of the feudal epoch, the town law was strictly stratified; it was through it that the stratum of townspeople was formed. However, the richness of economic and socio-cultural life of the city made town law more complicated and “open” for new relations than zemstvo feudal law.
The early urban law (for example, the law of the city of Strasbourg at the end of the twelfth century) was made up of liege-ordained injunctions and permissions. It was devoted mainly to the regulation of the status of lordship officers in the town, mutual relations between officers and townsfolk, and also to the determination of the duties which townsfolk were obliged to fulfill in favor of their former lordship (bishop): smiths – to forge arrows for war, but only 300 pieces, innkeepers – to clean the bishop’s lavatory on Mondays, etc. The city was granted the right to shelter criminals who had fled to it. And every person – “both stranger and native, so that he may have peace in it at all times and from all.”
Later, city law began to take on an increasingly independent character. Town governments, having justified their independence, started to work out rules and charters for town justice and the whole life of the town by themselves. The most famous in Europe in the late Middle Ages were the Lübeck and Magdeburg law systems.
The law of Lübeck was the purest in principles of the city law. It coincides with the establishment of Lübeck on the Baltic Sea as a free imperial town (1226). The highest city government body began to register legal regulations for the needs of city justice, and then to systematize them. The first systematization of Lübeck law (90 articles) dates to 1263. During the next centuries the collection of Lübeck law grew: in 1586 it was 418 articles (including borrowings from Hamburg law). An inseparable part of Lübeck law was the Hanseatic Code, devoted to the law of the sea and trade. The printed collection (1608) systematized the municipal law in six sections: general rules, inheritance law, contract and obligation law, criminal law, court law, regulation of ship’s affairs.
Lübeck law was extremely widespread in Northern Europe. Over 100 towns on the Baltic coast, especially members of the trade-political Hanseatic League, accepted the Lübeck privilege to use its rules and regulations: Rostock, Wismar, Königsberg, Revel and Riga. With this acceptance the supreme jurisdiction of the Lübeck court was also recognized for these cities. It was not until the end of the 15th century that the Duke of Holstein (in whose lands Lübeck was) transferred appellate jurisdiction to other land courts.
The Magdeburg Law was more widespread in Central and Eastern Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Poland, and Western Russia. It originated in the bishop’s constitution of 1188, which recognized the independence of Magdeburg. Magdeburg. Its origin was different from that of Lübeck. Magdeburg law was an adaptation of German law – mainly the Saxon Serzal – to the needs of city courts. It was formed not by statutes or systematization, but by the record of the decisions of the city’s Schaffen court. Private codifications of these records appeared in the XIII century. By the XIV century Magdeburg law took almost complete form, embracing with typical decisions the main fields of criminal, property, liability, commercial, inheritance and family law. It was then that the Magdeburg law began to be widely adopted by other Central European cities. The city’s own systematization of law did not survive (in the early 17th century, Magdeburg’s magistrate and judicial archives were destroyed by fire). The main code of Magdeburg law was the Code of Gerlitz (1304), made in one of the subsidiary cities.