PRECARIA. — Name of an agricultural contract that enjoyed wide diffusion especially between the 6th and 12th centuries. As a rule, its object was the granting in usufruct of a plot of land by its owner (grantor) to a grantee (precarist) for a fixed period and under conditions that varied considerably from case to case. It normally consisted of two documents, one in the form of a petition (also called p.) submitted by the precarist to the grantor, the other in the form of a grant (called praestaria or commendatitia, or likewise p.) submitted by the grantor to the precarist, as a reciprocal guarantee. The determination of the essential and constant elements of the p., level (v.) emphyteusis (v.) and benefice (v.), are highly controversial: the terminology of the documents is contradictory, and the attempts at clarification by the old jurists hinder rather than facilitate the historian’s investigation.
The name p. (which in the sources indicates the contract, the document, and the prestation imposed on the precarist) was originally an adjective; according to some, it referred to possessio, according to most, to epistola. These two interpretations are connected with the two principal conceptions of the p. that still divide the field.
According to the first (Schupfer), the p. was a contract distinguished by substantive elements, developed from the ancient Roman precarium; but whereas the latter was gratuitous and without precise legal guarantees, in the p. a term and a compensation were established, followed later by written documentation. According to the other conception (Pivano), the essential element of the p. lay in its documentary form. This distinguished the p. from the level, an equally formal contract, while at the same time making it adaptable to the most varied contents: the same contract could be a p. or a level as regards its form, and emphyteusis or pastinato or something else as regards its substance. Neither of the two opposing conceptions, understood rigidly, can be adapted to all the cases presented by the sources unless some of them are regarded as exceptional. On the other hand, it is clear that in the great majority of cases both are equally valid.
P. between private individuals are very rare. The predominance of p. granted by churches is such that the contract itself has sometimes been regarded as an institution typical of canon law. The p. verbo regia, granted by churches through royal intervention and especially frequent in Merovingian and Carolingian France, do not depart from the general pattern.
Ecclesiastical p. had various forms (though the classification is modern): p. data, when a church granted property that had previously belonged to it; p. oblata, when it granted in usufruct to the precarist property that he had received as a donation; p. remuneratoria, when it granted property partly already belonging to it and partly received as a donation; p. commutativa, when it granted its own property in exchange for other property donated to it; to say nothing of other forms that were more complex or less frequently applied. The favor enjoyed by oblate and remuneratory p. in the early Middle Ages is explained by the advantages they offered both to the churches, which put their own property to productive use without violating the principle of its inalienability (the five-year renewal of the title was also intended to serve this purpose), and to private individuals, who deprived themselves of bare ownership (burdened with taxes and exposed to continual encroachments), but retained the enjoyment of their property, made more secure by the protection of the churches to which they had donated II.
Ecclesiastical legislation on the subject, which began with the Council of Agde in 506, was not proportionate to the institution’s wide diffusion; when the Decretals of Gregory IX (III, 14) gave the p. a definitive regulation, it was already in decline. In the late Middle Ages it gradually became confused with related institutions and disappeared.