His Decretum (Decree) made the canon law look much more systematic, and the scholars began to take it seriously, embarking on interminable debates about its relation to the ‘civil law’. Most universities now taught both. In England, the Archbishop of Canterbury recruited a Lombard scholar to assist him with the resolution of disputes, and the text this scholar compiled for his students became the basis for legal training in the new university at Oxford. The civil law had now acquired such prestige that no European university thought it worthwhile to teach any of the laws that were actually
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