Regiam Majestatem

Regiam Majestatem is the earliest comprehensive digest of Scottish law, written between about 1306 and 1329 by an author who remains unknown, though Scottish scholars once, mistakenly, credited it to King David I to give it a native origin. Named for its opening words, it is arranged in four books covering civil actions and jurisdiction, judgments and their execution, contracts, and crimes, drawing roughly two thirds of its text without change from the English jurist Ranulf de Glanvill's treatise of 1188, and supplementing it with canon law, Geoffrey of Trani's Summa in Titulos Decretalium, and the Celtic Laws of the Brets and Scots. Because Edward I's thirteenth century invasions destroyed much of Scotland's legal record, the rediscovery of Regiam Majestatem in the fifteenth century led it to be embraced immediately as an authoritative source, and Sir John Skene's printed edition of 1609, despite inconsistencies with the original manuscript, became the standard text on which Scots law continued to draw into the modern era. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/