fine for breaching each of them.^84 The ‘king’s full mundbryce’ was
reserved for damaging the king’s ships, and above all for breaking
church-peace, the essential gridbryce, for the king’s function was above
all to gridian and fripianchurches.^85
Gridand mundmerged into each other, to the extent that they were
conflated in the Latin translator’s pax. Cnut placed mundbrice(id est,
infractionem pacis, said the translator: ‘that is, breach of the peace’) at
the head of the list of the rights or pleas in the king’s personal juris-
diction, followed by attacks on homesteads, lying in ambush, the
harbouring of fugitives, and neglect of military service. To start with,
the king’s mundwas simply more valuable than the mundof an arch-
bishop or royal prince, as his personal power was greater, and the
mundbryceof archbishop and prince was in turn costlier than a bishop’s
or an ealdorman’s. But through the developing legal processes, the royal
mundflowed to fill the interstices between the local ‘griths’ enforced by
powerful aristocrats, cementing them into a single public peace.^86 The
idea of the king’s public authority was abstracted from his concrete
exercise of judicial power. Peace was something that wrongdoers as well
as their victims were entitled to receive from the king when they came
to argue their cases in his courts. Gridunder the king’s mundwas
guaranteed by King Edmund to a killer once he had pledged himself to
pay the wergild; and it was burghbryceif a wronged person resorted to
force without first demanding justice. Cnut conferred a special gridon
anyone but a proven thief going to or from court (‘that is, to a
placitum’, says the translator).^87 A century the other side of the Norman
Conquest, Henry II’s novel procedure for deciding questions of right to
land, the Grand Assize, began with the suing out of a ‘writ of peace’ by
the sitting tenant, to stop the customary method of trial by battle.^88
Only the king wielded this peace: no one else might receive an outlaw,
a fridleasanman, back into the public peace. Pax regiswas an abstrac-
tion from the workings of gridand mundin legal proceedings and
largely independent of the Roman and ecclesiastical ideal of peace,
though it could invoke the support of that ideal when necessary.^89
30 Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Justice
(^84) Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, i. 222 (2,1), 228–32 (1; 13; 15), 234–5 (4,1),
254–5 (34), 258 (42,3), 263–4 (3; 4,1; 5,1), 282–3 (2,5), ii. 28, 642 (3a); F. W. Maitland,
Domesday Book and Beyond(Cambridge UP, 1897: repr. Fontana Library 1960), 225–6, 235.
(^85) Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, i. 254–5 (34), 258 (42,3), 263–4 (3; 4,1;
5,1), 282–3 (2,5).^86 Ibid. i. 316–17 (12).
(^87) Ibid. i. 190 (7), 234–5 (4,1), 366–7 (82).
(^88) Glanvill, ed. Hall, 29.
(^89) Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, i. 274 (Cnut, 1020, 12) 316–19 (II Cnut, 12,
13, 15a), 470–3 (a treatise of 1028 × 1070 Be gride y be munde), 366–7 (82); Glanvill, ed.
Hall, 29; for sanctuary (fridsocn), see Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 124; also
F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, History of English Law before the time of Edward I, 2nd edn.,
2 vols. (Cambridge UP, 1898), ii. 590–1.