VACARIO. – Glossator of Roman-Justinian law, designated as magister Vacarius, born in Lombardy ca. 1115–20, died in England after 1198.
He studied the new juridical science at Irnerius (v.). Around 1145 he settled in England at the invitation of the domus of Teobaldo, archbishop of Canterbury, to which he belonged as an ordained clericus. He was the first to introduce the teaching of Roman jurisprudence to the island; after the death (1154) of King Stephen, who had prohibited it, he held a chair chiefly at Oxford, to which he owed his fame. After the death of Teobaldo (1161), he entered the service of the archiepiscopal Curia of York, under Rogerio, whom he helped to free from the accusation of complicity in the assassination of St. Tomaso Becket, and under Goffredo Plantageneto. In 1198 Innocent III entrusted him with preaching the Crusade for the Holy Land in the province of York.
In the early years of his teaching, ca. 1149, he wrote a scholastic compendium of the Justinian Code and Digest, with coordinating and explanatory glosses, which continued to be enriched with personal notes or notes taken from oral instruction: it came to be commonly called Liber pauperum, because it was easily acquired by those students, consequently called pauperistae, who lacked the means to procure the more costly complete legislative texts.
In the Summa de matrimonio, composed ca. 1156, he treated as a civil lawyer the question of the essence of the marriage contract, debated between the canonists of Bologna and the theologians
of Paris, completing the Parisian position on consensus by identifying the perfecting element of the matrimonial transaction in the traditio or mutua susceptio. He also shows himself opposed to the conciliatory tendency fashionable among the decretists. In De assumpto homine (manuscript of the University of Cambridge), and in other untraced opuscula, he defended the reality of the nature of Jesus Christ and the unity of the person. He found a broader field for discussion in Liber contra multiplices et variis errores (before 1177), in which he refuted the errors of his former fellow student U. SPERONI, UGO (v.), who had become a heresiarch, developing many important theological themes. In keeping with his juridical spirit, V. proceeded in defending traditional doctrine with precision of concepts and rigor of argument, alternating scriptural auctoritates and rationes, with frequent recourse to notions and examples drawn from Roman law.