Duby, Georges. Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, trans. Cynthia Postan.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968.
——, and Armand Wallon, eds. Histoire de la France rurale des origines a 1340. Paris: Seuil,
1975.
Slicher van Bath, Bernard H. The Agrarian History of Western Europe: A.D. 500–1850, trans.
Olive Ordish. London: Arnold, 1963.
PEACE OF GOD
. A popular conciliar movement combining lay and ecclesiastical legislation on the
regulation of warfare and the establishment of social peace, the Peace of God has been
considered the first popular religious movement of the Middle Ages.
The practice of holding peace councils began in the late 10th century in southern
France, in Auvergne, Aquitaine, and Rouergue. During an initial phase of strong
enthusiasm, it spread rapidly through most of France and survived in some form until at
least the 13th century. The early councils typically took place in large open fields to
which relics of saints had been ceremonially paraded. The seniores (high nobility,
bishops, abbots) would proclaim peace legislation designed to protect civilians, such as
unarmed clerics, peasants, merchants, pilgrims, and women, from the violence and
expropriations of the warrior class of lords, castellans, and knights. This proclamation
often took the form of an oath, sworn on relics by the fighting classes in the presence of
the assembled crowd.
The peace movement’s almost messianic expectations (regulating warfare through
collective voluntary commitments), generated enthusiasm at the councils themselves but
in the long run failed to eliminate the violence of the landholding and weapon-bearing
classes. As a result, despite the initial determination to hold peace councils at regular
intervals of five years, the practice gradually declined. By the later 11th century, more
effective and long-lasting movements, such as papal reform, the communal movement,
and the Crusades, replaced the Peace of God at the center of European concerns. Each of
these later developments deployed characteristic elements of the Peace (collective oaths,
sanctified violence) to more limited and effective ends. All of them share with the Peace
elements that suggest they are all part of a larger social transformation at work in the 11th
and 12th centuries—the importance of an informed and active public, autonomy of
popular initiatives, and collective religious enthusiasm.
Richard Landes
[See also: ASSEMBLIES; CONCILIAR MOVEMENT; MILLENNIALISM; TRUCE
OF GOD]
Cowdrey, Herbert E.J. “The Peace and Truce of God in the Eleventh Century.” Past and Present
46(1970):42–67.
Duby, Georges. The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1977, pp. 123–33.
Goetz, Hans Werner. “Kirchenschutz, Rechtswahrung und Reform: Zu den Zielen und zum wesen
der frühen Gottesfied-ensbewegung in Frankreich.” Francia 11(1983):193–239.
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