The starting point of the enquiry described here was a direct result of discussions at the Fishacre Colloquium. The existence of a Martin de Fishacre who was a witness in the early 1240’s to the Inquisition, now called Testa Nevill was identified. The place-name enquiry to find the Fishacre where Martin lived began with scrutiny of current Ordnance Survey maps and identified three places all with the element, Fishacre, in the name within a few miles of each other in the hundred of Haytor in South Devon. They are Fishacre Barton, a farm, in the parish of Broadhempston; Combefishacre, a string village settlement in a small deep valley about four and a half miles to the east; and Coleton Fishacre, a very small settlement above the cliff top between Kingswear and Brixham. Examination of the publications of the English Place-Name Society showed that there are no other settlements in England and Wales with this unusual element of “fishacre” in the name. This part of South Devon with the streams flowing towards the river Dart on its east bank and the coastal peninsula between Dartmouth and Torbay contains the origin of the name, Fishacre. So far, it is uncertain which place was the first to have the name Fishacre. In the Exon. Domesday Book Combefishacre is recorded as Comba while Coleton Fishacre is recorded as Coletona. Broadhempston is referred to in the Exon Domesday but not Fishacre Barton, which is about two miles southwest of the village.

The original mission of the Dominican Order was preaching the word. It was a direct result of the constitution Inter Cetera of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 under Pope Innocent III, according to which bishops who were over-worked or who were not up to the demands of preaching should establish groups of preachers in their dioceses as their helpers and coworkers in the pastoral care.

Dominic Guzman, who was at the Council with his diocesan bishop, Fulk of Toulouse, was convinced that in the band of preachers he had set up in Toulouse, he had a means of making sure that this constitution would not remain a dead letter. A little more than a year later, in January 1217, he obtained from the new pope, Honorius III, a mandate that gave general approval to the work of preaching already begun at Toulouse.

This papal confirmation of Dominic’s Toulouse preachers, as preachers in general, was followed over the next three years, 1218 to 1220, by many ‘Letters to Prelates’ urging them to make use of the preachers and to encourage them in the office of preaching to which they have been deputed. Now in these letters of recommendation and in the mandate Gratiarum Omnium (the real foundation charter of the Dominican Order), there is no mention whatsoever of the sacrament of penance, the counselling of souls or the hearing of confessions. This is somewhat strange given that the Constitution Inter Cetera of the Lateran Council had explicitly joined the function of hearing confessions to that of preaching.

This year marks the 750th anniversary of the death of the first two Dominican masters at the University of Oxford, Robert Bacon OP and his student and successor Richard Fishacre OP. From the former there survives only a Psalms commentary and a sermon. From the latter, however, we have a number of works, including the earliest Sentences Commentary composed in England. Peter Lombard’s four books of Sentences offered to their readers, which eventually included all candidates for the degree of master of theology at the leading medieval universities, a systematic exposition of texts from the Fathers, principally St. Augustine. It was therefore seen as the locus of speculative or “dogmatic’ theology as opposed to “moral” theology, the locus of which was the Scriptures.

This role for Lombard’s work, moreover, was reaffirmed in a so— called epistola secreta, a sealed letter, issued by Pope Innocent IV and addressed to Robert Grosseteste, who was at the time bishop of Lincoln but who still kept a close watch on developments at the studium where he had spent so much time and invested so much energy.

The topic of this brief communication, Theology and Law in Fishacre’s Sentence Commentary, emerges, as one might expect, from the decade- long project of producing a critical edition of the commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences by the Dominican theologian, Richard Fishacre. Preparing this edition has been a delightful and often-surprising exercise, and it is one of the surprises that concerns us here. Put in the form of a question, it is this: Why does a Dominican theologian, teaching in the theology faculty of the University of Oxford during the 1240’s, devote so much of his exposition of Book Four, on the Sacraments, to a detailed consideration of the Church’s canon law and to the teachings of the jurists?'

The edition of Fishacre’s commentary provides two kinds of clues to the question. The first is what Fishacre says, explicitly, and the second is what he does—the ways in which he utilizes canon law and the teachings of the canonists in his commentary. We will examine each type of evidence in turn.

Fishacre, like most medieval teachers, took a great deal of care in writing his inaugural lecture for each term of study in the schools, and these lectures now form the prologues to his commentaries on each of the four books of Sentences. What is striking, at least to this reader, is not what Fishacre says about the relation of Law and Theology, but rather what he does not say. Nowhere in the Prologue to Book Four does he prepare us for the abundant recourse he is about to make to the teachings of the canonists.

Philosophers regularly debate with their predecessors, historians of philosophy are often astonished at the results, yet the two seldom exchange notes. The Bounds of Sense, published in 1966 by Peter Strawson, is one of the best books by one of the finest Oxford philosophers of our day: an interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the author allows in the second sentence of the preface that, ‘as any Kantian scholar who may read it will quickly detect, it is by no means a work of historical-philosophical scholarship’. In the other philosophical tradition, Martin Heidegger brought out a study of Kant in 1929 which immediately sold out: in his preface to the second edition (1950), he allowed that the ‘violence’ of his interpretation, deplored by Kantian scholars, could indeed be substantiated from the text, but fended off the criticism by claiming that ‘historical-philosophical research is always justified when it makes this objection against attempts that want to bring about a thoughtful conversation between thinkers’. He goes on: ‘In contrast to the methods of historical philology, which has its own task, a thoughtful dialogue stands under different laws’. In short, students of the history of philosophy have a job to do; but they have no part in the conversation in which philosophical thought takes place. Heidegger, and even Strawson, clearly regard the work of historians of philosophy as less than vital for the advance of philosophy.

University students of philosophy, in whichever tradition, learn within their first few weeks to rehearse the objections to Cartesianism; it is not an objection that, historically, Descartes may never have been a Cartesian.