peace-oath on the relics of the first martyr, St. Stephen, followed by the
other bishops, their priests and people, so that like another Israel they
would be able to beat down the proud and bring back the enemies of
peace to right ways. But Gerard of Cambrai’s fears were justified here:
people were set against their landlords, and members of the ruling class
against each other. Aimo used for his own ends the popular forces he
had harnessed, making the enforcement of the peace an excuse to raise
a tax and to turn fire and sword, without mercy to women and children,
upon a castle and township held against him. Inevitably, both at Bourges
and Le Mans the footsoldiers of the communes were eventually cut to
pieces by the lords they had sought to tame.^14
In the middle years of the eleventh century there was spreading
through France a new form of peace pact ‘called, in the vulgar tongue,
the Truce of God’. It originated in 1027 at the council of Toulouges on
the Spanish march, where the bishops of the region, along with the
clergy and faithful people, reasserted the usual peace ordinances and the
prohibition of marriage within six degrees of relationship, but also
decreed that no one in that county or bishopric should attack his enemy
between the ninth hour on a Saturday and the first hour on a Monday.
Other councils soon extended the truce to begin on Wednesday evening,
for (as Glaber explained) ‘while Sunday is a holy day in recollection of
the Resurrection of Our Lord’, other days ‘should be freed from wrong
actions out of respect for the Supper and Passion of Our Lord’. When
Lent, the period covering the Rogation Days and Pentecost and other
feasts were added to the truce, private war was forbidden on a hundred
days or so of the year.^15
The ‘truce of God’ proscribing violent injuries of every kind for
lengthy intervals of time was added to the peace which gave continuous
protection to clergy, travellers, and the poor, to form the larger ideal of
‘the peace of God’: none should think they could instantly revert to
pillage when the treuga Deiended. Archbishop Raimbald of Arles and
Abbot Odilo of Cluny presented the larger ideal to the bishops and
clergy of Italy in a letter written between 1037 and 1042 in the name of
the clergy of France. The truce of God was sent from heaven, they said,
to allow people to go about their business, at least for four days and
nights in the week, secure from fear of their enemies. Anyone who killed
during the truce must suffer a long exile and go on pilgrimage to
Jerusalem, while those who broke the peace in some other way should
The peace of God 73(^14) Les Miracles de St. Benoît, ed. E. de Certain (Paris, 1858); Hoffmann, Gottesfriede,
105–10; T. Head, ‘The Judgment of God: Andrew of Fleury’s Account of the Peace League of
Bourges’, in The Peace of God, 219–38.
(^15) Glaber, Histories, 236–9; Mansi, Concilia, xix. 483–4;Constitutiones et Acta Publica
Imperatorum et Regum: 911–1197, MGH Legum Sectio 4, i (Hanover 1893), 596 ff.; Hoff-
mann, Gottesfriede, 74–6; Bonnaud-Delamare, ‘La Paix en Aquitaine’, 458.