The traditional role of the bishops as protectors of the poor and weak
required courage and political skill in a world where the secular powers
were both the problem and the necessary support for churchmen.
Adhemar of Chabannes traces the beginning of the peace movement at
Limoges to a pestilence in 994 which inspired a meeting of the bishop
and the abbot of the monastery of Saint Martial with Duke William of
Aquitaine. A fast was proclaimed and all the bishops of the duchy
gathered at Limoges, bringing with them the relics of the saints. The
body of Saint Martial, the patron of Gaul, was taken from its tomb, joy
was immense, every infirmity ceased, ‘and a pact of peace and justice
was formed between the duke and the princes’.^4 The first canon of a
council of bishops and abbots called by Duke William at Poitiers at
some date between 1000 and 1014 records that a general ‘restoration of
peace and justice’ was established by the duke and the nobles. They
ordained that an invader of another’s property should come before a
judge in the pagus and make restitution, or else he should find pledges
(obsides, hostages) that he would do so; if he refused, a council of
princes and prelates together would order his excommunication and the
seizure of his goods until he submitted.^5
In other parts of France the bishops sought to ‘reform the peace and
restore the state of the catholic faith’ on their own, or with the help of
the king and his enfeebled authority. Rodolfus Glaber describes the
spread of the movement from council to council, ‘to Arles and Lyons,
then across all Burgundy into the furthest corners of the French realm’,
as the glory of the first millennium.^6 Bishop Fulbert of Chartres wrote
to pledge his assistance to King Robert the Pious as long as he worked
for ‘justice, peace, the state of the kingdom and the honour of the
church’; and again to express his delight that Robert intended to hold a
council with the princes of the realm ‘for the sake of establishing
peace’.^7 A council held in the early 1020s at Verdun on the Saône had
particular importance, because the peace-oath of more than twenty
headings which was exacted from the ‘unnumbered multitude of nobles
and plebeians of both sexes’ assembled there was carried to the north of
France by two bishops attending from the province of Rheims.^8
70 The Spread of the Organized Peace
(^4) Adhemar of Chabannes, Historiarum Libri Tres, III, cc. 35, 69 in Patrologia Latina, ed.
J.-P. Migne, vol. cxli (Paris, 1880); D. F. Callahan, ‘The Peace and the Cult of the Saints in
Aquitaine in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries’, in The Peace of God, 165–83.
(^5) Mansi, Concilia, xix. 267, 502 ff.; Hoffmann, Gottesfriede, 39.
(^6) Glaber, Histories, 194–7; Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France(23 vols., Paris,
1737–1876), x. 171–2 (Ex historia Episcoporum Autissiodorensium, cap. 49), 233 n.
(^7) The Letters and Poems of Fulbert of Chartres, ed. and tr. F. Behrends (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1976), 34–5, 170–1.
(^8) C. Pfister, Études sur le règne de Robert le Pieux (996–1031)(Paris, 1885), 170; Hans-
Werner Goetz, ‘Protection of the Church, Defense of the Law, and Reform: On the Purposes
and Character of the Peace of God, 989–1038’, in The Peace of God, 261–73.