of its own landgrave. In 1286 no lesser man than the archbishop of
Mainz was made ‘captain and rector’ in Meissen and Thuringia to
return them to a ‘peaceful state’, and an oath was sworn and a tax
raised to support his efforts. This was a response at the highest level to
a political crisis—the ‘imperial vicar and captain of the peace’ was given
the full extent of merum et mixtum imperium—but in both Thuringia
and Saxony the task required the efforts of lesser captains working
with a number of judges super pacis observancia.There were twelve of
these justices in Thuringia; further south eleven conservators or judges
‘of the general peace’ are found attempting to settle a dispute between
citizens of Strassburg and Seltz.^110 It is worth noticing that there was a
similar appointment of ‘captains and keepers of the peace’ (capitanei
et custodes pacis) in English counties at the end of the war of 1263–5
between the barons and King Henry III.^111 The captain was an
ambiguous figure, whose appearance marks a stage in the transition
from a feudal to a governmental order in both countries. He was a
‘chieftain’ drawing authority from his territorial status—but also from
a royal commission. The title of landgrave, for a new type of count with
a wide territorial authority, also emerged in the period of the Land-
friede, along with a new class of Lantrichteror provincial magistrates.
These jurisdictions, like the Landrechtwhich Eike von Repgow placed
alongside Lehnrechtor feudal law, were founded on local custom as
well as royal mandate.^112
England was small enough to allow the government to control,
though sometimes with difficulty, the local potentates it had itself raised
up as custodes pacis. In far bigger Germany, Rudolf’s reinforcement of
peace-agreements which had always relied upon the subscription of
provincial aristocracies served in the end to foster separateness. It was
at the provincial level that legislation for social peace and its judicial
application would coincide to make states. Through much of the
thirteenth century the Rhine towns and the nobility of the region were
forming peace-leagues for themselves, sometimes in conjunction and
sometimes in opposition, for the toll-regimes of the nobles were a
provocation to the townsmen. The great Rhine league of 1254–7 was
formed by the swearing of ‘a holy peace’ by the iudices, consuls, and
whole citizenry of Mainz, Cologne, Worms, Speyer, Strassburg, and
Basle: the cities of Nuremberg and Regensburg, the towns of West-
phalia, the archbishops, bishops, and abbots of the Rhineland, the
102 The Spread of the Organized Peace
(^110) Constitutiones 1273–98, 331–2, 363–4, 367–8, 382–4, 416–17, 420, 471, 527–9, 611–
13, 623–6; Angermeier, Königtum und Landfriede, 72–3; Arnold, Princes and Territories,
62–5, 130–2, 215–16.
(^111) A. Harding, ‘The Origins and Early History of the Keeper of the Peace’, TRHS, 5th ser.
10 (1960), 97.
(^112) Constitutiones 1273–98, 625, for a letter from a Lantrichter.