Assizes of Jerusalem

As Peter Edbury says: "one group of sources from the Latin East that have long excited the attention of scholars are the legal treatises often known collectively, if somewhat misleadingly, as the Assises of Jerusalem.

By the 13th century, the development of this structure was lost to memory, but jurists such as Philip of Novara and John of Ibelin recounted the legends that had grown up about the early kingdom.

Whether or not these legends were true (Edbury, for one, believes they were not), the 13th century jurists envisioned the legal structure of the kingdom to have existed continuously from the original conquest.

[2][3] The surviving collections of laws are: Also important on its own, although found in the Livre au Roi, Philip, and John, is the Assise sur la ligece, a law promulgated by King Amalric in the 1170s, which effectively made every lord in the kingdom a direct vassal of the king and gave equal voting rights to rear-vassals as much as the greater barons.

Modern historians generally recognize the dangers in attributing 13th-century laws to the 12th-century kingdom, although earlier it was believed that these assizes represented the purest form of medieval European feudalism.