as necessary on the herbage and young trees by the side of the road, but
without laying them waste (c. 20).
In November 1158, at Roncaglia on the banks of the Po, ‘exercising
care for the commonwealth and the state of individuals’ within it,
Frederick confirmed for Italy as well as Germany his ordinance of 1154
proscribing the unlicensed alienation of fiefs, and added prohibitions on
the division of duchies, marches, and counties. Vassals were now to
answer for the behaviour of every member of their households towards
overlords, under penalty of forfeiting their tenements. A lord should
himself decide a dispute between two of his vassals over a fief, but a dis-
pute between lord and vassal should be settled by the other vassals of
his court. Also at Roncaglia Frederick issued an edict of perpetual peace,
to which everyone between the ages of eighteen and seventy, ‘dukes,
margraves, counts, captains, vavassors, and rulers, with the great and
small of every place’, were to bind themselves by oath every five years.
Special attention was given to corporate misbehaviour. A city breaking
‘the aforesaid peace’ should pay a fine to the royal treasury of a hundred
pounds of gold; a duke, margrave, or count a fine of fifty pounds; an
ordinary town, a captain, or a greater vavassor, of twenty pounds; any
other, of six pounds. The stability of the commonwealth was seen to rest
on the conduct of lordships and urban communities: other associations
‘within or outside cities’, even of blood-relatives, were totally forbidden.
The impression is given that the realm was too large and the local magis-
trates too numerous and diverse to be centrally directed, even those
appointed or confirmed by imperial authority: all that could be done
was to prescribe fines for judges also when they neglected justice—or, if
they were too poor to pay, then a whipping and five years exile from
their homes. The one other general peace proclaimed by Frederick I,
his constitution of 1186 contra incendiarios (against arsonists—and
also, in fact, against those who destroyed vines and fruit-trees), was
largely concerned with making outlawry effective, impressing on lords
responsibility for their vassal’s behaviour, and restraining aristocratic
feuding: a lord who intended to pursue his opponent with force and
arms must formally defy him at least three days in advance.^83
Without a royal judiciary supervising a corps of local officials like the
English sheriffs in enforcing these constitutions, the Landfriedencould
not, as it turned out, provide the basis of a pan-German, let alone
imperial, legal system and state. The state of himself and his empire,
which Frederick constantly asked the clerical beneficiaries of his
German Landfrieden 93(^83) Ibid.4–5, 32–6; Otto von Freising und Rahewin, Gesta Frederici seu rectius Cronica, ed.
F.-J. Schmale (Darmstadt, 1974), 456–60 (III, 31); tr. C. C. Mierow and R. Emery in The
Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa(New York, 1953), 202–4, 239–43; Constitutiones 911–1197,
449–52.