Medieval Law and the Foundations of the State

(Elliott) #1

be examined and punished according to secular law, and also sentenced
to double the penance prescribed by the sacred canons.^16
The Council of Narbonne in 1054, after declaring ‘that no Christian
should slay a fellow-Christian, for he who kills a Christian without
doubt sheds the blood of Christ’, set out the terms of a model truce.
Perpetual exile was prescribed not only for those who killed but also for
those who took their enemies prisoner or attacked their castles within
the truce. Anyone accused of lesser harm should be tried before his
bishop, or before other clergy at the bishop’s delegation, by the ordeal
of cold water, for the new laws of the treuga Deialso covered destroyers
of the olive trees from which holy chrism was made, and those who
harmed sheep and shepherds, every day and everywhere; even obdurate
debtors came under them to the extent that they were to be excluded
from the ministrations of their parish priests until they repaid their
debts.^17
As what a later writer called a ‘perpetual truce’, distinct from the
original treuga temporalis, the peace became a standard part of
episcopal legislation throughout France and spread into Catalonia,
Germany, and Southern Italy. The peace-oath proved useful to the papal
reform movement in its fight against simony (advancement in the church
by the use of money or social influence), clerical marriage, and other
forms of pollution.^18 In 1095, after years of conflict over the investiture
of prelates by lay princes, Pope Urban II came into France and held a
great council at Clermont. Fulcher of Chartres reports that in his
sermon Urban singled out ‘simoniacal heresy’ for attack and then
turned to denounce ‘thieves and burners of houses’ and those who
‘seized bishops, monks, priests, nuns and their servants, or pilgrims or
traders, to despoil them’. He had heard that, perhaps due to the
bishops’ own weakness in administering justice, scarcely anyone in
France dared ‘to travel on the road with hope of safety for fear of
seizure by robbers by day or thieves by night... Wherefore the truce
commonly so-called, which was long ago established by the holy
fathers, should be renewed.’ The varying lists of canons which survive
from Clermont show that the familiar run of reforming decrees was
indeed prefaced by a peace statute, and that the act for which the
council is most famous, the launching of the First Crusade, was an inter-
ruption of its normal business. The lasting but incidental result of the
council was in fact to bind the hopes of success in war against Islam to
peace in Europe: a special three-year truce was declared to protect those


74 The Spread of the Organized Peace


(^16) Constitutiones,911–1197, 596–7, 605 (12); Hoffmann, Gottesfriede, 82.
(^17) Mansi, Concilia, xix. 827–32.
(^18) Constitutiones,911–1197, 602–16; Hoffmann, Gottesfriede, 70–89, 223, 236; A. G.
Remensnyder, ‘Pollution, Purity, and Peace’, in The Peace of God, 280–307.

Free download pdf