ACCORSO (in Latin Accursius), FRANCIS, an eminent lawyer, born at Florence about 1182. He began the study of law at a late period of life; but such were his assiduity and proficiency, that he soon distinguished himself. He was appointed professor at Bologna, and became a very eminent teacher. He undertook the great work of uniting and arranging into one body the almost endless comments and remarks upon the Code, the Institutes, and Digests, all which tended to involve the subjects in obscurity and contradiction. When he was employed in this work, it is said that, hearing of a similar one proposed and begun by Odofred, another lawyer of Bologna, he feigned indisposition, interrupted his public lectures, and shut himself up, till he had, with the utmost expedition, accomplished his design. His work has the vague title of the Great Gloss. The best edition of it is that of Godefroi, published at Lyons in 1589, in 6 vols. folio. Accursius was greatly extolled by the lawyers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but those of the fourteenth and of the sixteenth formed a much lower estimate of his merits. There can be no doubt that he has disentangled with much skill the sense of many laws; but it is equally undeniable that his ignorance of history and antiquities has often led him into absurdities, and been the cause of many defects in his explanations and commentaries. He is said to have lived in opulence, and died at Bologna in 1260, in the seventy-eighth year of his age. His eldest son, Francis, who filled the chair of law at Bologna with great reputation, was invited to Oxford by King Edward I., and in 1275 or 1276 read lectures on law in that university. In 1280 he returned to Bologna, where he died in 1321.