VACARIUS (1120–I200?), Italian civilian and canonist of the school of Bologna, the first known teacher of Roman law in England, was brought to Canterbury, possibly by Becket, together with a supply of books upon the civil law, to act as counsel (causidicus) to Archbishop Theobald in his struggle, which ended successfully in 1146, to obtain the transfer of the legateship from the bishop of Winchester to himself. We next hear of Vacarius as lecturing at Oxford, in 1149, to "crowds of rich and poor," and as preparing, for the use of the latter, a compendium, in nine books, of the Digest and Code of Justinian. It became a leading text-book at Oxford, and its popular description as the Liber pauperum gave rise to the nickname pauperistae applied to Ox ford students of law. Nearly complete mss. of this work are still in existence, notably in the cathedral libraries at Worcester and Prague and in the town library at Bruges. Fragments of it are also preserved in the Bodleian and in several college libraries at Oxford. Stephen suppressed the teaching of the civil law and ordered the books on it to be destroyed; but after Stephen's death it flourished again. The same year (1154) Roger de Pont
l'Eveque, a colleague of Vacarius at Canterbury, was made arch bishop of York, and took Vacarius with him as legal adviser and ecclesiastical judge. He is last heard of in 1198. It is doubtless to the second half of the life of Vacarius that the composition must be attributed to two works the ms. of which, formerly the property of the Cistercian abbey of Biddleston, is now in the Cambridge university library.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.—Most of the original authorities are textually set out and annotated by Prof. T. E. Holland in vol. ii. of the Oxford Historical Society's Collectanea (189o). Wenck, in his Magister Vacarius (182o), prints the prologue, and a table of contents, of the Liber pauperum, from a ms. now lost. F. Maitland in the Law Quarterly Review, xiii., pp. 133, 270 (1897), gives a full account of the Cambridge mss., printing in extenso the Summa de matrimonio.