The Peace and the Truce of God in the Eleventh Century

Author(s): H. E. J. Cowdrey
Source: Past & Present , Feb., 1970, No. 46 (Feb., 1970), pp. 42-67
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society

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 THE PEACE AND THE TRUCE OF GOD IN
THE ELEVENTH CENTURY

DURING THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS OR SO, HISTORIANS HAVE DEVOTED

much study to the attempts to promote the Peace of God which was
first proclaimed in Burgundy and Aquitaine during the final quarter
of the tenth century, and the Truce of God which made its appearance
there a generation or so later. To begin with, it was largely from the
point of view of the legal historian that this subject was approached.'
More recently, its ideological, social and economic aspects have been
well to the fore.2 The purpose of this article is to consider, in the
light of modern discussion, the nature of the Peace and the Truce,
and to suggest what they may have contributed to the structures of
ecclesiastical and secular authority which began to be renewed in the
eleventh century.

The purpose of the Peace of God, in its original form, was to place
under special ecclesiastical protection certain categories of persons,
such as monks, the clergy, and the poor; and certain categories of
material things, like church buildings, church property, and poor
people's means of livelihood. It was no new thing for those in
authority to offer their peace and protection to those who faced the
violence of powerful and lawless men. In the heyday of Carolingian
rule and for far into its decline, this duty had been pre-eminently the
king's. When, for example, in 857 a missus of King Charles the Bald
sought on his behalf to protect clergy and church lands, together with

I E.g., L. Huberti, Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte der Gottesfrieden und Land-

frieden, i, Die Friedensordnungen in Frankreich (Ansbach, 1892), which remains
the most useful compendium of sources.
2 Particular mention may be made of the following works: R. Bonnaud-
Delamare, "Fondement des institutions de paix au xie siecle", Mdlanges d'histoire
du moyen dge dddids a la mdmoire de Louis Halphen (Paris, 1951), PP. 19-26, and
"Les Institutions de paix en Aquitaine au xie siecle", Recueils de la socidtd
Jean Bodin, xiv (I96I), pp. 415-87; G. Duby, "Les Laics et la paix de Dieu",
I laici nella "societas christiana" dei secoli xi e xii (Miscellanea del centro di studi
medioevali, v, Milan, 1968), pp. 448-69; H. Hoffmann, Gottesfriede und Treuga
Dei (Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae Historica [hereafter M.G.H.], xx,
Stuttgart, 1964); B. T6pfer, Volk und Kirche zur Zeit der beginnenden Gottes-
friedensbewegung im Frankreich (Berlin, 1957) - a particularly stimulating and
valuable Marxist interpretation; E. I. Strubbe, "La Paix de Dieu dans le nord
da la France", Recueils ... Jean Bodin, xiv (I96I), pp. 489-501.

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 THE ELEVENTH-CENTURY PEACE AND TRUCE OF GOD 43

nuns, widows, orphans and the poor, he provided for just such needs
as did the later Peace of God.3 The Peace differed only because its
sanctions were the bishops', not the king's; even in this it followed a
still older usage whereby church councils excommunicated the
invaders of church lands and property.4 This tradition was resumed
with the enfeeblement of royal authority in western Francia. The
early tenth-century dialogue De statu sanctae ecclesiae looked to the
ecclesiastical hierarchy, from bishops upwards through metropolitans
and primates to the pope himself, for the excommunication of those
who sacrilegiously seized church endowments.5 In practice, at
various councils the bishops began to try to protect the lands of the
church and of the poor.6 A familiar example is the Burgundian
council of Anse (994), when two archbishops and nine bishops forbade
lay magnates to violate the lands or churches of the monastery of
Cluny, to build castles or fortifications that might threaten it, or to
plunder its livestock.7
Such measures as this can scarcely be regarded as proclaiming the
Peace of God, for they embodied no general peace for whole classes of
society or categories of thing. But during the last quarter of the
tenth century such peaces were already appearing. The councils of
Le Puy (975) and Charroux (989 or 990) provide the first clear
examples of which evidence survives. At Le Puy Bishop Guy
assembled an open-air meeting of the knights and peasants of his
diocese in the field of Saint-Germain, "to hear from them what advice
they had to give about keeping peace". He sought to enforce an oath
to respect the goods of the church and of the pauperes, and he overcame
the resistance that he encountered by calling upon the armed support
of his kinsmen the counts of Brioude and Gevandan. The council
of Charroux was attended by Archbishop Gumbald of Bordeaux a
his suffragans. Although the word pax does not occur in the record
of its dealings, its three canons anathematized those who broke into

3 Allocutio missi cuiusdam Divionensis, M.G.H., Capitularia regum Francorum

ed. A. Boretius and V. Krause, ii, pt. i (Hanover, 1890), no. 267, caps. 1-2,
pp. 291-2.
1 E.g. Orleans (538), cap. xxv, M.G.H., Concilia, i, pp. 8o-I; Paris (556-73),
cap. i, ibid., pp. 142-3.
5 E. Diimmler, "Uber den Dialog De statu sanctae ecclesiae", Sitzungs-
berichte der k6niglich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, ph.-hist.
Classe, xvii (1901), pp. 362-86, esp. pp. 38I-2.
6 E.g. Fimes (88I), cap. v, J. D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et
amplissima collectio [hereafter Mansi], xvii, cc. 541-5; Vienne (892), cap. i,
Mansi, xviii, c. I2I; Trosly (909), caps. v, vii, ibid., cc. 275-86. For the
significance of such councils, see H. Maisonneuve, "La Morale d'apr's les
conciles du xe et xie siecles", Milanges de science religieuse, xviii (1961), pp. 1-46.
7 Mansi, xix, cc. 99-102.

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44 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 46

and robbed churches, those who made off w

abiding peasants and poor men, and those w
clerks.8 There followed many similar councils i
notably at Narbonne (99o), Le Puy (c. 990
Poitiers (c. o1011-I4), Charroux (1027-8), Lim
(1029-31), and Bourges (1031); also in Burgun
le-Doubs (1019-21) and Anse (1025); and so fo
speed, the work of these councils in protecting
persons and goods was taken up in most parts of
royal demesne.
The Truce was a further stage in these dev
the Peace sought to protect certain classes and t
the Truce was an attempt to stop all violenc
first appearance was at the council of Toulouges
of Roussillon. A pactum vel treuga was swo
enable every man to show proper respect for t
should attack his enemy between Saturday
morning. During the I30os and I040s, the Tr
forbid violence on an ever longer list of days a
disseminated as part of churchmen's endeavour
The canons of the council of Narbonne (1054) w
development of legislation regarding the Peace
first half of the eleventh century.9

II

Such, to the modern observer, were the Peace

their formative periods. A contemporary would
them in a fuller and less legal context. The chr
for example, gave a chronologically telescope
when he was describing the time of peace and
1033 ushered in, however transiently, with the
passion. He told how the tempests, famines
years - notoriously years of general dearth
Europe - were at last abated. Therefore the
and Burgundy assembled councils at which
themselves abbots and laymen of all social c
were brought innumerable relics of saints, a

1 For Le Puy, see Chronique du monastere de Saint-P

and J. Vaissete, Histoire gingrale de Languedoc, v (T
Charroux, Mansi, xix, cc. 89-90.
1 For the council of Toulouges (or Elne), see Mans
council of Narbonne, ibid., cc. 827-32.

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 THE ELEVENTH-CENTURY PEACE AND TRUCE OF GOD 45

"concerning the renewal of peace and the establishment of our holy

faith". There were numerous miracles of healing. Led by the
bishops, all present cried in unison to God, "Pax, pax, pax", for an
everlasting sign of the promises that had been made between them-
selves and God.10
Ralph Glaber's picture of general enthusiasm and the background
of deliverance from natural disasters against which he set Peace
legislation, indicate that the Peace of God was a more complex matter
than conciliar canons by themselves suggest. This is borne out by
other evidence, such as hagiography, chronicles, sermons, and
similar literature; and, indirectly, by archaeological investigations of
churches and monasteries. Of outstanding importance are the
writings of Adhemar of Chabannes, who not only wrote an important
chronicle but also left a corpus of other material about such councils
as Ralph Glaber summarily describes." A complete picture of the
sponsorship and nature of the Peace of God must be drawn from all
such evidence.
The literary sources confirm Ralph Glaber's testimony that it was
the bishops upon whom the Peace councils chiefly turned. This is to
be expected, for, as Carolingian authority crumbled away, the
episcopal order remained intact in its structure and functions. It was
the bishops who convened the tenth-century gatherings which led up
to the Peace councils. Above all it was the bishops, as distinct even
from the monks, who exclusively disposed of the old judicial sanction
of excommunication and the new judicial sanction of interdict by
which the Peace was imposed: it was, after all, to the apostles whose
successors the bishops were, not to the monks and still less to lay
rulers, that Christ had left the power to bind and to loose upon earth.
Nevertheless, as Ralph Glaber again suggests, the monks were
prominent at the Peace assemblies. There emerged no Peace

"o Historiarum, iv.5.I4-I6: Raoul Glaber, Les Cinq Livres de ses histoires
(9oo-o1044), ed. M. Prou (Paris, 1886), pp. 103-5.
I IAdhemar was born c. 988 near Limoges, where he entered the monastery of
Saint-Martial. Although he soon migrated to Saint-Cybard, Angouleme, of
which he remained a monk until his death on pilgrimage to Jerusalem in lo34,
he was a lifelong zealot for Saint-Martial and its interests. For his chronicle,
completed c. 1028, see Ademar de Chabannes, Chronique, ed. J. Chavanon
(Paris, 1897). The principal collection of his other writings is L. Delisle,
"Notices sur les manuscrits originaux d'Ademar de Chabannes", Notices et
extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliotheque nationale et des autres bibliotheques,
xxxv (1896), pp. 241-358. See also J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina [hereafter
P.L.], cxli, cc. 79-124; E. Sackur, Die Cluniacenser in ihrer kirchlichen und
allgemeingeschichtlichen Wirksamkeit (Halle, 1892-4), ii, pp. 479-87, cf. i,
pp. 392-6; C. de Lasteyrie, L'Abbaye de Saint-Martial de Limoges (Paris, 1901),
pp. 422-6; Hoffmann, Gottesfriede und Treuga Dei, pp. 257-9.

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46 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 46

propagandist more zealous than the monk A

It was the monks who brought the relics that
performed the miracles, and the ever-mou
monasteries as places of pilgrimage was har
peace.12 The councils were enthusiastically r
all classes. In Aquitaine, the dukes were prominent at them.
Ralph Glaber's testimony to their eclectic social composition is
supported by Adhemar of Chabannes. According to him, the Peace
gatherings at Limoges were attended by the principes, the nobiles and
the vulgaris plebs.13 The councils made a further impact upon the
laity because their canons were published locally by the bishops of the
various dioceses.
The principal concern of the councils was for the protection of
churchmen, unarmed laymen, and their goods. From this angle it
was no accident that the later decades of the tenth century witnessed
the new departure of the Peace. The juncture was determined by
the progressive deterioration of public authority in France. Whereas
the ninth century saw the collapse of royal authority and of the central
organs of secular government, the local unit of Carolingian
administration, the pagus, remained largely intact until the second
half of the tenth century. Then over wide areas it, too, began more
or less completely to disintegrate. It was replaced by a multiplicity
of local lords who built castles and who vied with each other for the
control of their neighbourhoods, while they knew the restraining hand
of no superior lay authority. The problems to which the disintegra-
tion of the pagus gave rise were particularly acute in France south of
the Loire, where the advent of the Capetians in 987 marked the final
end of royal control. 4 The Peace councils were the churchmen's
self-defence, so far as any was possible.
Three specific problems were particularly pressing. First, the
churches, both secular and monastic, were the victims of depredations
by local lords who ignored all human laws. The author of the De
statu sanctae ecclesiae already appreciated the threat which they
presented to the possessions and the jurisidiction of churchmen.l5
By the end of the tenth century, his fears were evidently well
12 Relics and miracles were important as early as Charroux: Delatio corporis
sanctij uniani in synodum Karrofensem, P.L., cxxxvii, cc. 823-6. For monasteries
and pilgrimage, see, besides TOpfer, Volk und Kirche, pp. 38-57, the work of
J. Hubert, esp. "La Place faite aux laics dans les 6glises monastiques et dans les
cath6drales aux xie et xiie siecles", I laici nella "societas christiana", pp. 470-87.
13 Delisle, art. cit., p. 291.
14 For an analysis of these developments, see G. Duby, La Socitde aux xie et
xiie sidcles dans la rdgion mdconnaise (Paris, 1953), esp. pp. 150-71.
15 Diimmler, art. cit., pp. 382, 384.

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 THE ELEVENTH-CENTURY PEACE AND TRUCE OF GOD 47

grounded. Cluny's troubles in 994 illustrate the predicament of

many churchmen less influential than Abbot Odilo who found
themselves face to face with new castles and their lords.16 As the
foundation and endowment of such monasteries as Cluny often
reveals, such lords were sometimes in terror of spiritual sanctions.
Charroux and later councils sought to constrain them to respect the
peace of the church and of the poor by bringing to bear the threats of
excommunication and interdict.
Secondly, the vacuum left by the creeping disintegration of public
authority gave a new vitality to the feud as a kind of "wild justice"
whereby the lay classes, and especially the lords of castles, might
defend their own interests and set a limit to the worst consequences of
lawlessness.1 Such a means of self-vindication and self-defence was
not so readily available to churchmen as it was to laymen, and they
needed to contrive a remedy of their own. Moreover, in a society
where fighting was the pastime of the upper classes, the legitimate feud
all too readily spilled over into mere disorderly violence, which caused
general devastation, not least upon church lands. As the Peace
councils gathered momentum, a principal concern of the bishops was
at least to restrict the feud to its acceptable function of upholding
justice, and so to impose a limit upon unbridled violence and disorder.
The sacramentum pacis which, as the councils spread northwards,
Bishop Warin of Beauvais proposed in Io23 to King Robert the Pious,
well illustrates this concern.18 So, too, does the abortive attempt in
c. 1033 by Archbishop Aimo of Bourges to declare a kind of "war
upon war", by mobilizing the whole adult male population to coerce
aristocratic peace-breakers.19
Thirdly, the mounting disorder of society fell with particular
severity upon the peasantry. It did so the more as time went on,
because the military and social upgrading of the knight in the
burgeoning feudal society of France - itself in part the result of the
church's increasing willingness to bless his profession of arms - was
rapidly widening the gap between the milites and the pauperes. This
significant early eleventh-century distinction made ever more serious
the defencelessness of the poor.20 Furthermore, in the south of
16 The churchmen's outlook is well illustrated by Fulbert of Chartres,
Hymni et carmina ecclesiastica, no. xx, P.L., cxli, c. 349.
17 For the feud in medieval society, see 0. Brunner, Land und Herrschaft,
4th edn. (Vienna and Wiesbaden, 1959), pp. I-IIo.
18 C. Pfister, 1tudes sur le regne de Robert le Pieux (996-1031) (Paris, 1885),
Diplomes in6dits de Robert, no. xii, pp. ix-lxi.
19 Andrew of Fleury, Miracula sancti Benedicti, ii-iv, Les Miracles de saint
Benoit, ed. E. de Certain (Societe de l'histoire de France, Paris, 1858), pp. 192-8.
20 See Duby's remarks, art. cit., I laici nella "societas christiana", pp. 453-5.

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 48 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 46

France, with its multiplicity of allodial holdings of

its vineyards and horticulture, the poor were more
the feudally better-organized north where lay and
had a greater interest in the defence of a more dep
Like the other unprotected classes, such as wom
pilgrims, peasants had similar needs of protectio
clergy who, in obedience to their profession, we
Such protection the councils aspired to ensure for
were partly religious: the duty of protecting the p
been insisted upon by such influential writers
Cluny.21 They were also partly self-interested, for
peasants as upon the other unprotected classes
ecclesiastical income that came from them both in
services. And the more that churches themselves amassed lands and
wealth, the greater their own problems became.
Therefore the Peace councils legislated to bring security to certain
classes of persons and their goods. But if the evidence about them
is considered as a whole, they were by no means only concerned with
the violence and disorder of a disintegrated society. They also took
account of other scourges which, while they were not so appropriate
for positive legislation, were closely bound up in men's minds with
the problem of peace. Ralph Glaber introduced the Peace councils
in a context of deliverance from such recurrent famines as were caused
by storm and flood in the early Io30s. Worse still were the epidemics
that followed such crop failure. The sources for the early Peace
councils are full of references to the dreaded visitation known by such
names as the ignis sacer. It is now known to have been a gangrenous
form of ergotism, the result of eating bread made from tainted rye-
flour.22 According to the prevalence upon damp corn of the mould
known as ergot, its mental and bodily torments came and went with
a suddenness for which eleventh-century men knew neither natural
explanation nor human remedy. In their eyes, like the storm and
famine which went before it, it fractured the order of human life
much as did warfare and plunder. Lacking the means alike to prop

21 E.g. in his portrait of a pattern lay lord, Vita sancti Geraldi Auriliacensis
comitis, P.L., cxxxiii, cc. 639-702.
22 For a medical and historical account of this epidemic, see H. Chaumartin,
Le Mal des ardents et le feu Saint-Antoine (Vienne-la-Romaine, 1946); also
J. Rauch, "Der Antoniterorden", Archiv fiir mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte,
ix (1959), PP. 33-50. The modern drug L.S.D. is a derivative of ergot, and the
taking of these substances has many effects in common, particularly psychologi-
cally. For a possible modern outbreak of ergotism in France, see J. G. Fuller,
The Day of St. Anthony's Fire (London, 1969).

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 THE ELEVENTH-CENTURY PEACE AND TRUCE OF GOD 49

up a crumbling social order and to mitigate overwhelming natural

disaster, they looked for a peace which was a deliverance from all
manner of scourges that destroyed their welfare - human violence,
storm, famine and epidemic.23 Hence the prominence of the cultus
of the saints and the bringing of relics to the Peace councils. To
borrow some words of Professor Southern:
When the machinery of government was simple or non-existent, these
tangible agents of spiritual power [i.e. relics] had an importance in public life
which they lost in a more complicated age. The deficiencies in human
resources were supplied by the power of the saints. They were the great
power-houses in the fight against evil; they filled the gaps left in the structure
of human justice.24
The Peace councils looked to the saints and assembled their relics in
order both to secure deliverance from natural disaster and to provide
guarantors of men's own pledges of mutual peace and justice.
Animated by their presence, the councils were times of religious
enthusiasm and of exhortation to a repentance and conversion of life
which would turn away God's wrath and show gratitude for his healing.
Thanks to Adhemar of Chabannes, it is at Limoges that the whole
pattern of the quest for peace can be most fully seen. Adhemar's
writings repeatedly refer to the Peace council of 994. According to
his Chronicle, it was convened because the ignis sacer was everywhere
raging. Abbot Geoffrey of Saint-Martial, Limoges, called for a
three-day fast, and afterwards a great open-air assembly met upon
a hill outside the city:
All the bishops of Aquitaine assembled together at Limoges. The bodies
and relics of the saints were solemnly conveyed there from all parts, while the
body of St. Martial, the patron of Gaul, was borne from its sepulchre, so that
everyone was filled with immeasurable joy. All sickness everywhere ceased,
and the duke [of Aquitaine] and the principes concluded a mutual pact of
peace and justice.25

Adhemar's sermons of later years repeatedly drew out the moral of

these events. The ignis sacer was God's punishment for men's sins,
and especially for the violence of powerful laymen. The fiery
punishment did, it was true, fall upon the poor, not the rich. But
"the righteous often dies for the ungodly": it was God's vicarious
warning to the unrighteous rich that they should repent. At St.
Martial's intercession, God had mercifully stayed his anger from his
23 Adhemar of Chabannes could claim that, at Limoges in 994, not only had
an outbreak of the ignis sacer just miraculously ceased, but "within a short time
warfare was turned into peace, disaster into safety, barrenness of the land into
fertility, and famine into sufficiency": Delisle, art. cit., p. 270.
24 R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London, 1953), P. 137.
25 Chronique, iii. 35, P. 158; cf. Comrmemoratio abbatum Lemovicensium, P.L.,
cxli, cc. 82-3.

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50 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 46

people. In return it behoved the principes to a

bishops', or rather God's, call to promise pe
concluding of peace under episcopal sancti
pattern of events which began with the sign of
with healing by the intervention of the saints
answering contract of peace and justice.
Adhemar's writings leave little room for dou
the minds of churchmen, the search for p
a religious movement which sought much mor
church property or even a respite from soc
embody something approaching their total
Adhemar described how the clergy of Aqui
twice-yearly councils at Limoges, made quasi-l
tions of peace, as a means of propagating it th
The principal bishop arises; then, kneeling with all
the king and all set in authority, and for the peace
church, beginning the seven penitential psalms. N
prayers, and prayers for the absolution of sinners.
bow in silence. Afterwards they stand up and the
peace, and they all offer the kiss of peace to one an
they may remain in the peace of Christ and harm
peace may be upon them all and upon all the peop

In much of the Peace propaganda, the Peace of God was thus

represented as a renewal of the peace which Christ himself bequeathed
to the church and of the pristine customs of apostolic Christianity.
Adhemar, for example, rejoiced that, when it obeyed the bishops' call
to refrain from violence, the gens Aquitaniae had been made the filia
pacis. For the peace of the bishops was the same peace that Christ
himself committed to his apostles. It was renewed whenever the
bishops fulfilled his word to the seventy, "Say, 'Peace be to this
house!' And if a son of peace is there, your peace shall rest upon
him".28
Upon the basis of the need to provide for physical peace and
security there was thus erected a superstructure of the preaching and
liturgical commemoration of peace in an ideal sense as the planting
upon earth of the order that God willed to prevail. The means to
26 Delisle, art. cit., p. 290; cf. pp. 293-6.
27 Delisle, art. cit., p. 271; cf. Sackur, Die Cluniacenser, i, pp. 392-6. Such
passages should be read in the light of the prayers concerning peace following
the canon of the Latin mass, the frequent repetition of which was clearly crucial
in shaping the outlook of eleventh-century clergy.
28 Luke x. 5-6. For the sermon, see P.L., cxli, c. 115. This and the following
sermons are often regarded as apocryphal, but the matter deserves a fresh
examination. Their probable date is c. 1031. See Bonnaud-Delamare, art.
cit., Recueils. . . Jean Bodin, xiv (1961), pp. 433-7.

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 THE ELEVENTH-CENTURY PEACE AND TRUCE OF GOD 51

this was the renewal of the peace that Christ committed to the
apostles at the beginning of the church - the peace of the church
which, for centuries, churchmen had taught was broken by grave sin
and restored when transgressors returned to it by way of penance.
Such an understanding of peace linked it with all the associations of
the word pax in Augustinian and later thought.29 From its more
limited connotation of freedom from human violence, peace gained,
or recovered, a positive meaning in terms of divinely-sustained order,
healing, and righteousness.
Adhemar's writings also provide evidence of another and related
development to which the quest for peace at Limoges contributed.
His power to secure deliverance from the ignis sacer won St. Martial
great fame as the protector of Aquitaine, and his tomb at Limoges
became a much-sought centre of pilgrimage.30 He became the
patron par excellence of peace in all its aspects. Now, in the light of
the developing ideology of peace, the nearer in history he could be
represented as standing to Christ the giver of peace, and to St. Peter
as the head of the apostles to whom Christ committed it, the more
impressive his patronage would be. So, with Adhemar as their
tireless protagonist, the monks of Saint-Martial put forward the claims
that their patron had been Christ's companion in his Ministry, at the
Last Supper, and at the Ascension; that he was one of the seventy
whom Christ had sent out with the gift of peace; that, as such, he was
an apostle; and that, after the Ascension, St. Peter himself had sent
him to evangelize Aquitaine.31 The bishops and secular clergy of
Limoges at first resisted this monastic legend-building; but Bishop
Jordan at length conceded St. Martial's apostolicity, for it at once
added lustre to his see and, especially in Adhemar's annual com-
memorative sermons, gave new credibility to St. Martial's especial
power to mediate the peace which Christ left behind him upon
earth. 32
This vintage example of eleventh-century legend-building about
a patron saint marks out Limoges as something of a special case. But
its prestige as a pilgrimage centre caused the ideas that were current
there to be widely disseminated. Moreover, the Peace propaganda of
Limoges was only an especially elaborate example of what was being
put about throughout France and beyond in places which had no
29 H.-X. Arquillibre, L'Augustinisme politique (Paris, 1934), PP. 9-17, 144-50.
30 Chron., iii. 49, PP. 171-2.
31 The legends figure in Adhemar's works, passim, the most elaborate
statement being his Epistola de apostolatu Martialis, P.L., cxli, cc. 89-112.
32 The apostolicity was affirmed by various councils: e.g., Bourges (1031),
canon i, Mansi, xix, c. 503.

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 52 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 46

prophet so eloquent as Adhemar of Chaban

pattern of ideas, which linked epidemics
miraculous intervention of saints and their r
in response of pacts of peace and justice, seems to have been
particularly widespread.33 So, too, was his conviction that the
purpose of Peace legislation was to renew the peace that Christ left
with his apostles. For instance, at Poitiers (c. o11-I14) the preamble
to the canons ran:
How fair is the name of the peace and how beautiful is the repute of the unity
which Christ left to his disciples when he ascended into heaven.

The council saw its task as being to restore this peace and unity: it
met "for the renewing of the church", and it concluded a "renewal of
peace and justice".34 It was because the Peace councils proclaimed
such a peace as this that, according to Ralph Glaber, those who
attended them answered the bishops with their cries of "Pax, pax,
pax". Peace among men was but one aspect of a wider Peace of God.
Such were the ideas that were developed in connection with the
Peace of God. Both by reason of the safeguards which it promised
against natural and human disasters, and of the religious enthusiasm
which it generated and canalized, it has every title to be regarded as
a coherent movement, and as one which involved all grades of
society.35 The Truce of God, which developed within it, was more
strictly aristocratic. Its primary purpose was to restrain the military
classes from the exercise of arms at certain times. The word treuga
was in no way calculated to attract to itself such a wealth of religious
meaning as almost inevitably gathered about the word pax, with its
biblical, theological and liturgical overtones. Nevertheless, religious
ideas centring upon the Peace had their effect upon the Truce,
quickly making it more than just a negative ban upon certain
activities. The simple prohibition of Toulouges, which, for the
better keeping of the Lord's Day, forbade the shedding of blood on
Sunday, was soon extended to Thursday, Friday and Saturday, for
these days were reminders of the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the
Entombment of Christ. The Truce was also proclaimed upon the
33 Miracula sancti Adalhardi abbatis Corbiensis, Recueil des historiens des Gaules
et de la France, x (Paris, 1760), pp. 378-9; Hugh of Flavigny, Chronicon, ii,
M.G.H., Scriptorum, viii, p. 403; Landulf Senior, Historia Mediolanensis, ii. 30,
ibid., p. 67.
34 Mansi, xix, c. 267. A similar understanding of peace is clear in Adhemar's
account of the suppression of the Manichaean heresy at Charroux (IO027-8):
Chron., iii. 69, p. 194.
35 Tipfer's insistence upon this point was partly anticipated by
L. C. MacKinney, "The People and Public Opinion in the Eleventh-Century
Peace Movement", Speculum, v (1930), pp. 18I-2o6.

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 THE ELEVENTH-CENTURY PEACE AND TRUCE OF GOD 53

greater saints' days and during such solemn seasons as Advent and
Lent.36 As it was right for all lay Christians to abstain at certain
times from food, or from servile labour, or from sexual intercourse,
so too it was a reasonable ascetic precept that the military classes
should sometimes abstain from their favourite pastime of arms.
But this was a logic that demanded to be carried farther. If, in
the name of Christian observance, men should keep themselves from
shedding Christian blood at some times, ought they not to do so at all
times ? It did not take the proponents of the Truce very long to
draw such a conclusion. In 1054, at the council of Narbonne, it was
laid down that "no Christian should kill another Christian, for
whoever kills a Christian undoubtedly sheds the blood of Christ".37
At least in theory, the Truce had brought the Peace movement to the
point where it should logically require complete internal peace to be
maintained in the whole of Christian society. It was a critical point
in more ways than one. The churchmen who were calling upon the
knights to practise internal peace had also set their blessing upon the
weapons of their warfare. The Peace movement could scarcely
develop further unless a voice with sufficient authority complemented
the precept of internal peace by finding an appropriate external outlet
for those whose vocation was Christian warfare. Moreover, the
internal peace towards which the Truce was pointing was the vainest
of hopes unless it were reinforced by the active vigilance of temporal
rulers - unless, that is to say, it became their peace.
By 1054, the Peace movement was hardly capable of further
development unless it had an authoritative lead from popes and lay
rulers, and unless it exchanged its original autonomy under the
bishops for a place in more solid structures of ecclesiastical and
temporal government.

III

If it be judged by its legislation and the ideas to which it g

currency, the movement for the Peace and the Truce of God up to
council of Narbonne was a remarkable one; but in face of the ende
lawlessness of French society, its practical effectiveness was l
impressive. Under the shadow of famine or of the ignis sacer, suc
preaching as that of Adhemar of Chabannes commanded attent
and men promised to uphold peace and justice; when such disas
seemed remote they no doubt slipped back into their former ways.
36 The extension of the Truce and its aspect as a religious discipline ar
evident in a council probably at Arles (c. 1042): Mansi, xix, cc. 593-6.
37 Canon i, ibid., c. 827.

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 54 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 46

After Narbonne, the Peace movement seems

some of its impetus and coherence. The struc
of lay society were not yet ready to take up
which it presented them, and so to give it
epidemic, healing, and the concluding of a
justice, seems to have disintegrated. In partic
tion between the ignis sacer and endeavou
relaxed. This was especially so after c. 1070
of Dauphine brought home from Byzantium t
most famous of miracle-working saints, A
Antony replaced St. Martial as the healer of th
bore his name, but he did not become a patro
Peace of God again find so eloquent a spok
Chabannes. The records of the Peace, which
Narbonne, come increasingly from the north o
thoroughly feudalized social structure. There,
upon the Peace as such with its lavish ideolog
the more legal and disciplinary Truce. With t
however, the letters and canon-law compilatio
testify to the continuing vitality of the Pe
institution of French life up to and beyond t
If they had their beginnings in the morcellem
Carolingian decline, they survived to make an
bution to the building up of ecclesiastical a
They did so, not only in France, but also o
were in various ways open to French infl
follow at least some of the threads which ran from the institutions of
the Peace and the Truce to the growing structures of the high Middle
Ages.

The church

The Peace and the Truce did not contribute directly to the re-
assertion of papal authority in the head and members of the church
which took place in the Gregorian age. But they played a vital part
by creating in France a milieu within which the reformed papacy
came to be, on the whole, quietly accepted by the French church,
and within which Urban II in 1095 could demonstrate papal
ascendency over French feudal society in the successful preaching of
the First Crusade.
They prepared the ground for the papacy of Gregory VII, with its
3s Yves de Chartres, Correspondance, ed. J. Leclercq, i (Paris, 1949), nos. 28,
44, 62, pp. 118-20, 174-84, 258; Panormia, lib. viii, cap. cxlvii, P.L., cxli, c. 1343.

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 THE ELEVENTH-CENTURY PEACE AND TRUCE OF GOD 55

insistence upon the universal jurisdiction of St. Peter and his vicar,
and upon the apostolic see as the apex of an ecclesiastical hierarchy.
With the influential ideas of the Forged Decretals behind it, even the
tenth-century De statu sanctae ecclesiae spoke with remarkable
clearness, in dealing with the problems to which the Peace movement
was to attempt an answer, of the clerical hierarchy of bishops,
metropolitans and primates, with its supreme authority at Rome.39
Early in the eleventh century, the papacy could occasionally figure as
the ultimate guarantor of the Peace which the councils made.40 But
in the long term it was more important that the widespread reliance
upon spiritual sanctions as imposed by the bishops organized in their
provinces, was already accustoming men to such an exercise of
spiritual jurisdiction as the papacy was soon to claim for itself. The
episcopal order was consciously and with much accompanying
propaganda attempting to renew the peace of the apostolic church as
Christ had left it in the hands of St. Peter. By its activities and by its
ideas, it was establishing a milieu within which, as the apostolic see
became stronger, the vicar of St. Peter could look with confidence
for attention to his claims and for an understanding of his functions.
Furthermore, as events at Limoges reveal, the supernatural powers
of the saints were of greater significance than the judicial activities of
the bishops. The higher the status of a saint, the greater was the
advantage to a locality of his patronage. Hence, St. Martial affords
a classic example of the process - widely exemplified in the eleventh
century - whereby lesser saints tended to be overshadowed by
greater saints, lavish claims were advanced for patrons and prodigies
of legend-building were performed to back them up, until at last
lesser and greater saints alike were set in due subordination to St.
Peter, the prince of the apostles and patron of the see of Rome. At
Limoges, St. Martial's reputation as a deliverer from epidemic and
as an upholder of peace led to his meteoric rise from local saint to -
at least in the eyes of the Limousin - the patronus Galliae. Then
there arose the question of his apostleship. While the monks and
the seculars of Limoges were locked in controversy about it, Adhemar
of Chabannes insisted year in, year out upon St. Martial's nearness to
St. Peter, both through their common apostleship in Christ's days
upon earth, and also now as they together watched over Aquitaine.41
St. Peter was made to matter to the Limousin; and even in Adhemar's
day his vicar began to matter, too. On the issue of St. Martial's
31 Diimmler, art. cit., pp. 381-2. For the Forged Decretals, esp. Pseudo-
Isidore, see W. Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages
(London, 1955), pp. 180-4.
4o Adhemar of Chabannes, Sermon i, P.L., cxli, cc. II117-8.
41 Delisle, art. cit., passim, esp. pp. 254-5, 294-

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 56 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 46

apostolicity, both sides in turn appealed to R

bishop abortively to Pope Benedict VIII, but the
successfully to his successor John XIX.42 As
grew and with it the legend of St. Martial, St.
see thus both impressed themselves on the
Limousin. It was the first step in a process
incorporation of Saint-Martial in St. Peter's f
the legatine visit of Cardinal Peter Damiani (
brought papal authority still more effectively
the threshold of the Gregorian era.43
The Peace movement thus brought St. Peter n
and in general it emphasized the activities of t
of which his vicar was always the head and was
active head. It also helped to create a favour
II's French journey of 1095-6. There can be litt
genesis of the First Crusade, such institution
pilgrimage counted for more than did the Peace of God. But
Urban's preaching found its overwhelming response in the south of
France, where the original Peace of God had accustomed men to hear
the preaching of the renewal of Christian life. As a French aristocrat
by birth and as a former grand prior of Cluny, Urban was well
placed to appreciate the use to the papacy of the Peace of God;
through him the papacy for the first time effectively proclaimed it for
its own purposes.44
A comparison between Clermont and the earlier Peace councils
shows how considerably they set the stage for him. At Clermont,
there was a similar background of famines and epidemics, including
the ignis sacer, which created anxiety and made men take thought for
their sins and for the needs of the times.45 When Urban made his
42 For an appeal to Benedict VIII to rule that, while St. Martial was one of
the seventy, he was still only a confessor, see Bishop Jordan of Limoges's letter,
Ep. iv, P.L., cxli, cc. 1158-60; Benedict died before it arrived. For John XIX's
affirmation of St. Martial's apostolicity, which he emphasized by assigning him
an altar in St. Peter's basilica, see Ep. xv, ibid., cc. 1149-50. Adhemar laid
weight upon papal authority: Delisle, art. cit., p. 299; Hoffmann, Gottesfriede
und Treuga Dei, pp. 258-9.
43 I discuss these developments at Saint-Martial in my forthcoming book,
The Cluniacs and the Gregorian Reform.
44 The principal peace legislation of the early reformed papacy was Nicholas
II's (Io59): Ep. viii, Mansi, xix, c. 873; canons xv-xvi, ibid., c. 915. But it was
exceptional.
45 Sigebert of Gembloux, Chronica, s.a. lo89-95, P.L., clx, cc. 224-5; Orderic
Vitalis, Hist., ix. 2, ed. le Prevost, iii (Paris, 1845), p. 463. According to the
earliest historian of the Hospitallers of St. Antony, Urban II on his French
journey and at Clermont was much concerned with the founding of his order,
which devoted itself to the victims of the ignis sacer, and with reforming the cult
of St. Antony: A. Falco, Antonianae historiae compendium (Lyons, 1534), fols.
xliiiv- xlivv, xlviir-v.

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 THE ELEVENTH-CENTURY PEACE AND TRUCE OF GOD 57

summons to the Crusade, the circumstances were familiar. He

addressed a great concourse of both clergy and laity. As at so many
Peace councils from Le Puy (975) and Limoges (994) onwards, they
assembled in the open. Their answering cries of "Deus le volt"
recall the earlier cries of "Pax, pax, pax".
Urban almost certainly spoke at length about peace. There is no
authentic record of what he actually said, but Fulcher of Chartres
describes him as having been deeply moved by the internal turmoil of
Christendom:
He saw how the Christian faith was trampled under foot by all, both clergy
and people, and how the warfare and strife of the princes of the world
endlessly brought about the destruction of peace.
According to Fulcher, he revived the theme of the Peace movement
as it was preached in earlier times, by calling upon Christians to
renew the peace of the Church in its pristine quality.46 The versions
of Urban's speech agree that he urged an end to men's strife against
their Christian neighbours, and the dedication of their arms to a
salutary warfare against the heathen.47 As the canons of Clermont
were preserved by Bishop Lambert of Arras, they accordingly
prescribe, for the first time in the history of the Peace of God,
a perpetual peace within the whole of Christendom.48 The Crusading
propaganda that followed Clermont seems to have taken up this
call.49
In all this, the Crusade in effect resumed the Peace movement
where it was left by the canons of Narbonne (1054). Narbonne
enunciated the principle that Christians ought not to shed Christian
blood; Urban drew the conclusion of proclaiming a general peace
within Christendom. The church had increasingly given its blessing
to the warfare of knights and had begun to use them to keep peace;
Urban directed them to a new field of battle in the holy war against
the pagans of the east. The Truce of God was as it were an ascetic
discipline; Urban associated with the keeping of peace at home and
the journey to liberate Jerusalem the spiritual benefits that had
previously been reserved for pilgrims.50 His Crusade was the
46 Historia Iherosolymitana, i. I, Recueil des historiens des croisades, historiens
occidentaux, iii (Paris, I866), p. 321; cf. i. 4, P. 325.
47 The best study of the chroniclers' record of Urban's speech is
D. C. Munro, "The Speech of Pope Urban II at Clermont, 1095", Amer. Hist.
Rev., xi (1906), pp. 231-42; esp. p. 239.
48 Canon i, Mansi, xx, c. 816.
49 A. Gieysztor, "The Genesis of the Crusades; the Encyclical of Sergius IV
(I009-I2)", Medievalia et Humanistica, v (1948), pp. 3-23; vi (1950), pp. 3-34;
esp. lines 26-31 of the text of the "Encyclical".
50 C. Erdmann, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (Weimar, 1935), is
still the best analysis of the origins of the First Crusade.

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58 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 46

complement of the Peace movement. He did no

in bringing peace to France, but by making himse
peace he claimed the church and society of Fra
more fully than ever before.

Lay government
The Peace of God also made its contribution t
structures of lay society. But whereas in the cas
provided a milieu in which the popes could assert t
existing hierarchy and effectively summon Fren
Crusade, in the case of lay government its contrib
direct one. As in the early days of the Peace churc
the expedients of Carolingian government and ada
their own needs in protecting clerks, church pr
dependents, so in the course of the eleventh centu
to claim from churchmen the Peace and the Truce in order to use
them to build up their own authority once more.
It became the easier for lay rulers to claim them, because from the
end of the eleventh century, in many countries of Europe, the forms
of criminal justice began to change. Murderers, robbers and the like,
whatever their social condition, increasingly suffered punishment in
their bodies, while financial compositions for serious crimes became
unusual. Popular justice tended to give place to the justice of lords
and their officials, and lords accordingly made themselves the source
of peace in their own lands. The traditions of the Peace and the
Truce of God contributed to such developments, for when lay lords
punished serious crimes in the name of their own peace they often
drew upon these traditions in order to justify themselves and to
provide a sanction for what they were doing.
In such ways as this the Peace and the Truce increasingly assisted
the process, sometimes epitomized as "concentric concentration",51
by which temporal authority was slowly rehabilitated in western
Europe. Thus in France, the homeland of the Peace movement, the
disintegration of the pagus round about the year Iooo represents the
low-water mark of temporal authority. From this condition of
weakness its political structures began to be renewed when growth
points of authority and jurisdiction gradually appeared in the lesser
and greater fiefs, whose lords used the resources that they found to
hand. The kings in due course followed suit and so moved towards
51 See H. Mitteis, Lehnrecht und Staatsgewalt (Weimar, 1933), Pp. 282-3,
300-9; Der Staat des hohen Mittelalters, 5th edn. (Weimar, 1955), PP. 136,
208-9, 240-I.

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 THE ELEVENTH-CENTURY PEACE AND TRUCE OF GOD 59

the balanced feudal polity of the thirteenth century. In the light of

such developments as this the contribution of the Peace and the Truce
was made at gradually higher levels of society - first in a great fief
like Aquitaine but afterwards in the monarchies not only of France
but also of Germany and elsewhere. At the same time there was
a movement away from the south of France to regions, especially to
the north and north-east of the Loire, where there was a firmer
institutional basis for the maintenance of justice and public order.
In the duchy of Aquitaine, the secular ruler began to use the Peace
movement at a very early date, during the rule of Duke William V
Le Grand (990-1029). William was a zealous sponsor of the Peace
councils, and it was his intention by their means to win for the ducal
authority some of the prestige that peace activities were securing for
prelates like Archbishop Gumbald of Bordeaux.52 It was the duke
who summoned the council of Poitiers (c. 1011-14). Its canons,
designed to secure the "renewal of peace and justice", were not
only sanctioned by threats of excommunication, but peace-breakers
were to appear before the lord of their region or the iudex of their
pagus.53 Early eleventh-century secular justice was thus linked with
the Peace movement, and it gained in strength by being exercised in
so timely a cause. A further hint of the duke's methods is provided
by a charter of the Poitevin monastery of Saint-Maixent. It shows
how he presided at further councils where the measures of Poitiers
were renewed. As a consequence of his zeal, there in due course
came before his son, Duke William VI Le Gras (1029-38), certain
complaints from the monks of Saint-Maixent and of Saint-Lager that
his local iudices had invaded their lands and wrongfully oppressed
poor men. The duke, therefore, took steps to set matters right by
taking sworn evidence about the rightful jurisdiction of the iudices
from "the elders of the region and those who knew its ancient
customs". Their findings were written down in a formal descriptio
of the respective rights of the monks and the duke's officers, which
was sworn to by the principes and nobiles who were present.54
This attempt in pursuance of the Peace of God to rehabilitate and
rectify ducal authority did not long survive Duke William V. But in
the second half of the century it was imitated with greater effect and
permanence to the north in the duchy of Normandy. There ducal
power had left no foothold for the Peace in its early days, when it was
52 See Bonnaud-Delamare, art. cit., Recueils... Jean Bodin, xiv (1961),
PP. 415-87.
53 Mansi, xix, c. 267.
64 Chartes et documents pour servir c l'histoire de Saint-Maixent, ed.
A. Richard (Archives historiques du Poitou, xvi, 1886), no. cxi, pp. Io9-II.

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60 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 46

an episcopal remedy for near anarchy. It firs

certainly upon ducal initiative, in the time of
Bastard (1035-87) at the council of Caen (1047)
revival of his fortunes following the battle of
Norman measures seem to have drawn but little u
movement with its dependence upon episcopal gui
They imposed a Truce as an instrument of discipli
men, but in the special sense of a prohibition of fig
which forbade all warfare save the duke's own. In
words pax and treuga were synonyms for such
enforced by the duke's authority as well as by the
which was loyal to him. Thus from the start t
build up ducal power over the church and over the Norman
aristocracy.55
After io66, the Truce as thus first established in the continental
part of the Anglo-Norman kingdom was the basis of important
developments there. While evidence is scanty, it is enough to
suggest that the Truce was the means by which ducal control was
built up over criminal justice, and the lever by which ducal authority
was raised high above that of all other lords. A major step forward
was taken at the council of Lillebonne (io8o), when, as Orderic
Vitalis expressed it,
counsel was taken to the common advantage by the king's wisdom, with the
advice of his barons, for the good order of God's church and of the whole
realm.

The first canon of Lillebonne dealt with the "Peace of God, commonly
called the Truce". In it William reaffirmed his earlier legislation and
added a new machinery for enforcing it:
If anyone should be disobedient to the bishop, let the bishop show the matter
to the lord in whose land he dwells, and let the lord deliver him to episcopal
justice. If the lord should neglect to do so, let the king's vicomte be called in
by the bishop and let him act without making any excuse.56
Never before in the history of the Peace of God had the temporal
ruler provided so strong and automatic a sanction for its observance.
Much, indeed, was still left in the hands of the bishops. Moreover,
with the weaker rule of Duke Robert Curthose (lo87-IIo6), the
council of Rouen (Io96) imposed the Peace and the Truce in pursuance
of the decrees of Clermont with a clear affirmation of episcopal
jurisdiction.57 But the prevailing tendency was for the duke to take
55 M. de Bouard, "Sur les origines de la trave de Dieu en Normandie",
Annales de Normandie, ix (1959), pp. 169-89.
66 Hist., v. 5, ed. le Prevost, ii (1840), pp. 315-6.
67 Mansi, xx, cc. 921-6. Norman bishops held placita treugae into the
thirteenth century.

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 THE ELEVENTH-CENTURY PEACE AND TRUCE OF GOD 61

over the keeping of public peace. The Norman Consuetudines of

Io91, which set in writing the consuetudines et iustitiae of the duchy as
they were in William I's day, show how the duke himself assumed the
right to vindicate crimes that the Truce legislation from 1047
onwards had sought to put down.58 After King Henry I of England
had secured the duchy in Ilo6, he resumed his father's work. The
main evidence for this is provided by the Tres ancien coutumier, and
in it particularly by Henry's ordinance of 1135 which summed up the
developments of his reign.59 From this it seems clear that the trend
set by the Consuetudines had continued. The duke's courts were
trying many cases of breaches of the Truce and merely paying certain
of the incidents of justice to the bishops. In effect the Truce was
providing the material from which the duke's peace was being built,
and criminal jurisdiction was being concentrated upon the duke in
a way that raised him above all other sources of justice.60 Such, on
the continent, was the Norman legacy to later Angevin rule.
In the Norman lands of the south, the Peace of God and its
consequences for the structure of temporal government show
considerable similarities with Normandy itself.61 It was not until
after the death in io85 of the strong ruler Robert Guiscard that there
is clear evidence for it. In Sicily, where a fairly rapid and thorough
conquest favoured the establishment of a strong central authority,
Count Roger I may, perhaps, have proclaimed a general peace of his
own under lay authority as early as c. Io91-4,62 although if he did,
no details of it survive. In Apulia and Calabria, the Normans had
penetrated piecemeal, and the problems of peace and order were
therefore more intractable. The Truce of God seems to have been

58 C. H. Haskins, Norman Institutions (Cambridge, Mass., 1918), pp. 277-84;

cf. pp. 30-9.
59 E.-J. Tardif, Coutumiers de Normandie, i, Le tres ancien coutumier de
Normandie (Rouen, 1881), no. lxxi, pp. 65-8.
60 The subject of Normandy is discussed by J. Goebel, Felony and Mis-
demeanour, i (New York, 1937), PP. 280-335. The increasing concern of the
counts of Flanders with Peace measures which were in many ways similar to the
earlier Norman ones is outlined by Bonnaud-Delamare, "La Paix en Flandre
pendant la premiere croisade", Revue du Nord, xxxix (1957), PP. 147-52.
61 See esp. E. Jamison, "The Norman Administration of Apulia and
Calabria", Papers of the British School at Rome, vi, no. 6 (London, 1913),
pp. 239-43; C. Cahen, Le Rdgime fdodal de l'Italie normande (Paris, 1940),
pp. 107-10.
62 Such an inference is commonly drawn from the words "I have estab
a lasting peace through all Sicily" in a charter of Roger's to the church of
R. Pirro, Sicilia sacra, in Thesaurus antiquitatum et historiarum Siciliae
J. G. Graevius, iii (Leyden, 1723), c. 840. But comparison with the langu
similar charters suggests that they might simply refer to the expulsion
Saracens.

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 62 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 46

introduced and developed there by the direct ac

Urban II established it at the councils of Melf
(lo93);63 and Paschal II renewed it at the counc
So far as the evidence goes, these Truces depen
sanctions. Their scope was gradually extended, s
III15 not only protected certain seasons, but also s
a continuous peace for three years.
But in due course Roger II used the Truce which was thus
introduced to build up his own authority. Just before he assumed
the Sicilian crown in 1130, he established a peace of his own which
was very similar to that developed in Normandy by William I and
Henry I. At an assembly of magnates at Melfi in 1129 he issued an
edict prohibiting private war among his vassals. At the same time he
compelled them to swear peace amongst themselves. They were to
co-operate in maintaining peace and justice by bringing malefactors
to his courts, and they were charged to protect the clergy and the
non-military lay classes.65 Roger thus established, and as king was
to maintain, a general peace which made his own justice the basis of
the public order for which the earlier Truce had striven.
The appropriation of the Peace of God by a territorial ruler of
comital or ducal standing, of which the Norman lands provide the
best examples, was also a feature of the region of Spain which had
once formed part of the Carolingian Empire - the Spanish March of
Catalonia. Its continuing links with the south of France had
ensured that it quickly came within the ambit of the French Peace
movement. After the council of Toulouges (1027), numerous
councils there proclaimed the Peace and the Truce.66 Both the
papacy and the counts of Barcelona sought to gain advantage from
their introduction. At the council of Gerona (io68), Cardinal Hugh
Candidus as papal legate confirmed them and extended the scope of
the Truce.67 In 1079 Gregory VII instructed Bishop Berengar of
Gerona to assemble clergy and laymen, and to establish under papal

63 Mansi, xx, cc. 724-5, 790. Gregory VII, Ep. ix. 4, Registrum, ed.
E. Caspar, M.G.H., Epistolae selectae, ii (Berlin, 1920-3), pp. 577-9, may
provide evidence for the Truce at an earlier date.
4 Mansi, xxi, cc. 139-40.
65 Alexander of Telesia, De rebus gestis Rogerii Siciliae regis, i. 21, Rerum
Italicarum scriptores, ed. L. A. Muratori, v (Milan, 1724), c. 620. Roger's
detailed prohibition, at this time, of private war and brigandage may be inferred
from cap. xxxi of the Assize of Ariano ( 140): F. Brandileone, II diritto romano
nelle leggi normanne e sueve nel regno di Sicilia (Turin, 1884), p. I13.
66 For a fine example of a Catalan Peace, see Hoffmann, Gottesfriede und
Treuga Dei, pp. 260-2.
"6 Mansi, xix, c. 1072; cf. the council of Vich, ibid. c. 1076.

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 THE ELEVENTH-CENTURY PEACE AND TRUCE OF GOD 63

sanction a peace between the sons of Count Raymond Berengar I of

Barcelona. 68
If the Peace thus occasionally served to increase the authority of
the papacy, it contributed with more lasting effect to the structure of
lay government by feeding the authority of the counts of Barcelona.
There is evidence for this in the Usatici of Barcelona, a collection of
laws for the county, parts of which go back to the Io6os. Even in the
earliest material the count took a considerable part in upholding peace
and justice, especially in the region of Barcelona itself. As in
Normandy so in the Spanish March, the temporal ruler early began
to draw upon the Peace of God in order to build up his own peace in
the land.69
In the long run kings were able to imitate the example which
counts and dukes had set. The Peace first became a significant
factor for the building up of Capetian authority when from the middle
of the eleventh century peace arrangements upon the royal demesne
had in common with early Norman legislation some of the features
which favoured the ruler's authority.70 It was in the next century,
when papal endeavours were also directed towards building up peace
in France,71 that Kings Louis VI (11o8-37) and Louis VII (1137-80)
followed more resolutely the path of the dukes of Normandy. In the
royal demesne they used the Truce to establish a peace which was
essentially that of the king. As Capetian power grew, this peace
became stronger and more widely diffused.72
The Emperor, too, in the long run drew upon the legacy of the
Peace movement to his own considerable advantage. This was, it is
true, a fairly late development. If the Peace of God as it was at first
proclaimed in Aquitaine and the duchy of Burgundy had quickly spread
into the kingdoms of Burgundy and Italy, it had no appreciable
consequences there for the structure of temporal authority.73 In
Germany the strength of the Saxon and early Salian monarchy and its
institutions, and the place of the bishops in the imperial church

68 Register, vi.I7, ed. Caspar, pp. 423-4.

6" E. Wohlhaupter, Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte der Gottes- und Landfrieden
in Spanien (Heidelberg, 1933), PP. 351-9. I have not been able to see a text of
the Usatici.
70 Bouard, art. cit., Annales de Normandie, ix (1959), PP. 176-89.
71 At the councils of Rheims (1119): Mansi, xxi, cc. 236-7; Clermont (II30),
canon viii: ibid., c. 439; and Rheims (1148), canon xi: ibid., c. 716.
7" Twelfth-century developments are traced by A. Grabois, "De la trove de
Dieu ia la paix du roi. Etude sur les transformations du mouvement de la paix
au xiie siecle", Melanges offerts a' Rend Crozet, ed. P. Gallais and Y.-J. Riou
(Poitiers, 1966), i, pp. 585-96.
73 M.G.H., Constitutiones, i, nos. 419-21, 423, PP. 596-7, 602.

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64 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 46

system, were so much in contrast with cond

France that the Peace movement could scarce
there. So far as the integrity of church land
in the tenth century the De statu sanctae e
idealistically, contrasted France with the hap
Germany: there, far from rushing to despoil a
tenants dutifully placed their lands at the feet
humbly awaited his will.74 In c. 1024, when
French bishops tried to commend the Peace of
of Cambrai, whose diocese lay within the Empi
against them. The keeping of the peace, he
function, not a bishop's:
The bishop's task is to pray; it is for the king to f
curb strife by force, end wars, and promote the con
should exhort them to fight manfully for the publi
for them to be victorious.75

Further to the east and especially in Germania the embedding of the

church and its jurisdiction in the imperial structure at once gave
ecclesiastical justice firm backing and enabled the king to use it in
reinforcement of his own. Thus the objects of the western Peace
movement as regards public order were pursued under imperial
authority: of this his biographer's striking account of the future
Bishop Benno II of Osnabriick, wielding authority under Henry
III at Goslar as both archpriest and vicedominus of the royal palace,
provides a vivid if perhaps an extreme example.76
But with the minority of Henry IV (1056-65) the bonds of order
and stability in the Empire began to be seriously relaxed. The Saxon
rising of 1073 and Henry's struggle with Pope Gregory VII, and the
feuds which they stimulated, made matters worse. The example of
the French Peace became highly relevant: men asked for the kinds of
relief that it afforded and it began to find serious imitators.77 It was
the bishops who first sought to use it in order to mitigate disorder.
They proclaimed the Peace of God in councils at Liege (Io82),

74 Diimmler, art. cit., pp. 385-6.

75 Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium, iii. 27, M.G.H., Scriptorum, vii, p. 474.
76 Vita Bennonis II episcopi Osnabrugensis, 6-8, ed. H. Bresslau (Scriptores
rerum Germanicarum, Hanover, 1902), pp. 6-io.
77 Henry III's own somewhat idiosyncratic zeal for peace, which may have
been partly inspired by French models, had made no real imprint upon
Germany: G. B. Ladner, Theologie und Politik vor dem Investiturstreit, 2nd edn.
(Darmstadt, 1968), pp. 70-8.

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 THE ELEVENTH-CENTURY PEACE AND TRUCE OF GOD 65

Cologne (lo83) and Mainz (1085).78 At the last of them the king
himself was present, and the Peace that it announced was intended to
be observed in the whole Empire.
This introduction of the Peace of God was quickly followed by
local assemblies at which general peaces (Landfrieden) were promulga-
ted by lay authorities. Their purpose was to combat and limit
knightly feuds, and to put down robberies and other offences that
infringed public security. The whole populace was brought into
them and, without respect for the distinctions of free and unfree
condition that were still observed in the first German Peaces of God,
punishments of life and limb were imposed upon all who offended
against them. A lost Swabian Landfriede of 1083 was followed by
one for Bavaria (1094) and by an undated Peace for Alsace; Bernold's
Chronicle provides further evidence of endeavours to establish peace
by the anti-imperial side.79
The king himself was quick to follow suit. Henry IV's imperial
Landfriede of Mainz (1103) had the same general scope as the Peace
of God of lo85, but, in content, it put forward the characteristic
measures of the Landfrieden under imperial authority.80 The author of
the Vita Heinrici IV was well justified in regarding the Reichslandfriede
of I 103 as the culminating point of Henry's reign.81 For it embodied
a coherent plan to extend royal protection to all classes of society, to
check the lawlessness of the aristocracy and to bind it more closely to
the crown, and to subject all classes to a criminal law whose basis was
the peace of the Empire. In this way Henry IV's measures began the
great series of Reichslandfrieden which was continued by Henry V,
Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II.8 If other circumstances in
their times had been favourable, it might well have been the beginning
8 The text of the Liege Peace has not survived, but an account of it which may
be basically reliable is given by Giles of Orval, Gesta episcoporum Leodiensium,
iii. 13, M.G.H., Scriptorum, xxv, pp. 89-90; but cf. A. Joris, "Observations sur
la proclamation de la trove de Dieu ' Liege a la fin du xie siecle", Recueils ...
7ean Bodin, xiv (1961), pp. 505-45. Peace measures may have been introduced
at Liege from as early as c. io66. For Cologne and Mainz, see M.G.H.,
Constitutiones, i, nos. 424-5, pp. 602-8. The Mainz text closely follows that of
Cologne.
"I M.G.H., Constitutiones, i, nos. 427, 429, pp. 609-Io; Bernold, Chronicon,
s.a. 1093, M.G.H., Scriptorum, v, p. 457.
80 M.G.H., Constitutiones, i, no. 74, PP. 125-6.
81 Cap. 8, ed. W. Eberhard, Quellen zur Geschichte Kaiser Heinrichs IV, ed.
F.-J. Schmale (Berlin, 1963), pp. 438-40.
82 I follow here the judgements of H. Hirsch, Die hohe Gerichtsbarkeit im
deutschen Mittelalter, 2nd edn. (Graz and Cologne, 1958), pp. 232-5; and
K. Hampe, Deutsche Kaisergeschichte in der Zeit der Salier und Staufer, Ioth
edn., ed. F. Baethgen (Heidelberg, 1949), pp. 81-2. The Peace institutions of
Germany are comprehensively studied by J. Gernhuber, Die Landfriedensbewe-
gung in Deutschland bis zum Mainzer Reichslandfrieden von 1235 (Bonner
Rechtswissenschaftliche Abhandlungen, xliv, Bonn, 1952).

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 66 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 46

of such a strong monarchical power, based upon judicial and

administrative superiority, as grew up in France and in the Norman
lands.
This brief survey of lay government suggests that, so far as the
distribution of the Peace of God and of its effects is concerned, it was
proclaimed by churchmen and increasingly adapted by lay rulers for
their own purposes, to their considerable advantage. The Peace and
its consequences spread primarily within the boundaries of the former
Carolingian Empire. There were good reasons why this should be so.
It was in this Empire that the general maintenance of peace had
become the duty of the lay ruler, while churchmen had filled out the
idea of peace with Augustinian conceptions of divinely willed and
sustained order and righteousness. There too, and (as the measures
of its dukes illustrate) especially in Aquitaine, such Carolingian
devices as the sworn inquest were remembered and were available to
lay rulers in the service of peace and justice.
The Carolingian boundaries of the Peace developments of the
eleventh century are especially clear in Spain: there, the Peace was of
importance in the former Spanish March, but not as yet in the
Christian kingdoms further to the west. The major exception is
Norman Italy. There the Normans - "supremely the men who
made things work, the assimilators who took over existing institutions
and gave them a new efficiency unattainable by their originators""83 -
found it expedient, at the prompting of a French pope, to deal with
the disorders of Apulia and Sicily after the death of Robert Guiscard
by employing the means with which they had become familiar in
Neustria. The Normans in Italy are the exception proving the rule
which is so well illustrated by their kinsmen who conquered England.
In this land which was never under the Carolingian sway and by
contrast with Normandy, there was no real trace of the Peace or the
Truce of God before lo66.84 By the standard of the French church
with its firm structure of bishops and archdeacons, its regular and
busy councils, and its well-defined jurisdiction, the English church
was no ready-made instrument for promoting peace even had the
Normans wished so to use it. Instead, the remarkable strength of
Anglo-Saxon royal administration and of the local organization of
shires and hundreds put admirable alternative means of peace-keeping
into the Normans' hands. If, as Richard FitzNigel wrote that the
Conqueror's nephew Bishop Henry of Blois had told him, William I
had added to native English laws "those Norman laws from overseas
83 H. R. Loyn, The Norman Conquest (London, 1965), p. 30.
84 Hoffmann, Gottesfriede und Treuga Dei, pp. 254-6. Domesday Book
contains a reference to a treuva regis at Dover in Edward the Confessor's
day from 29 Sept. to 30 Nov. (the word pax is interlined over treuva): i, f. Ir.

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 THE ELEVENTH-CENTURY PEACE AND TRUCE OF GOD 67

which seemed to him most effective in preserving the peace (ad regni
pacem tuendam)",85 the Peace and the Truce of God were not among
them.86 They were and remained as unimportant upon the soil of
England as they were vital upon the soil of Neustria.87
But there were differences among the regions of the sometime
Carolingian Empire itself: the Peace began in the west and only
later did it penetrate into the east. This reflected the long-term
fortunes of the different regions. The east, even before the imperial
church system of the Ottos and Salians was established there, had
undergone an Entfrankungsprozess - a discarding of many of the
ideas and institutions of the Carolingian heyday - which was
energetically pursued by Louis "the German" (843-76) and his
successors. Roughly following the divisions of the treaty of Verdun,
the Carolingian lands split into three as regards their attitudes to
Carolingian traditions of government.88 Only in Aquitaine and
Neustria did the bishops transmit them in a fairly straight line to
eleventh-century lay rulers, as by their proclamation of the Peace of
God. So when the crisis of royal authority broke in later eleventh-
century Germany it was expedient to look westwards for models in
devising new peace institutions. Yet the burgeoning cultus of
Charlemagne in high medieval Germany is a reminder that this
borrowing was facilitated by the common Carolingian heritage of
east and west. Regarded in this light, the Peace movement of the
eleventh century is evidence of the potency of this heritage in shaping
much of continental Europe at its medieval apogee, and especially
the institutions which promoted peace, justice and social order.
St. Edmund Hall, Oxford H. E. J. Cowdrey

85 Dialogus de Scaccario, xvi, ed. C. Johnson (London, 1950),

88 But the procedure of inquiry which the duke of Aquitaine
Maixent in the Io30s may well have been used in France on othe
could have been known to those who planned the vaster descrip
Domesday Book, of which Henry of Blois went on to speak.
87 The only significant English evidence is that of the so-calle
Confessoris (c. 1135), which Maitland stigmatized as "private wo
untrustworthy kind". It speaks of a pax Dei et sanctae ecclesia
clerks and their possessions, and to the whole kingdom at cer
I.I-2.8a, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. F. Liebermann, i (Halle, 1903),
pp. 628-9. It is perhaps the result of an individual's revision in the light of
continental practice of Anglo-Saxon legislation which prescribed a special royal
peace at "holy tides" (e.g., v Ethelred 19, vI Ethelred 25, I Canute 17: Lieber-
mann, op. cit., i, pp. 243, 253-5, 296-7).
88 E. Ewig, in the course of a valuable discussion, has epitomized the situation
as " 'Entfrankung' im Osten, Fortbildung des hochkarolingischen Staatsgedan-
kens im Westen, Stagnation in der Mitte": Die mittelalterliche Kirche, i, Vom
kirchliche Framittelalter zur gregorianischen Reform (Handbuch der Kirchen-
geschichte, ed. H. Jedin, iii/i, Freiburg, 1966), p. 146.

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