heading for Jerusalem and the property and dependents they left behind,
and universal peace among Christian princes proclaimed to allow them
to unite against the enemy.^19
Bishops routinely promulgated the treuga Deiin their dioceses on the
authority of the Council of Clermont, and it was reaffirmed by the
Lateran councils which popes summoned in 1123, 1139, and 1179, but
the canon law of the whole church was never much concerned with the
truce. The great canonist, Bishop Ivo of Chartres, wrote in 1101 in reply
to a question from Archbishop Daimbert of Sens that the truce of God
was made for the common utility by an assembly of a locality (placito
et pacto civitatis ac patriae), and even a murderer could not be con-
demned under the terms of a peace he had not sworn to. The peace of
God was important in the long term for its development of ideas of
injuries committed ‘against the common utility’ and procedures for the
trial and punishment of peace-breakers which would be drawn upon by
the authorities of secular states.^20
The first object of the truce was to criminalize feudal violence and
rapine. Sieges must be inactive during the truce unless the defenders
tried to break out.^21 The scales of punishment prescribed for peace-
breakers began to classify crimes according to their gravity. Churchmen
graduated the length and severity of the penances they prescribed,
differentiated between exile within the diocese and outside it, and sent
those guilty of the ‘horrible malice’ of arson to Jerusalem or to fight
against the moors in Spain.^22 It was declared not to be a breach of the
peace to order the caning of a delinquent servant or pupil. At the other
extreme some peace agreements imposed death or the amputation of
limbs for homicide, wounding, the rape of virgins, and major thefts, and
it was at this period that blood punishments came to replace monetary
payments as the resolution of feuds. Those who received criminals or
fugitive serfs made themselves liable to the same penalties as the people
they sheltered, and those guilty of verbal abuse incurred beatings.^23
But Ivo of Chartres insisted (on the authority of St. Augustine) that
peace-breakers should not be punished until they had been properly
tried and convicted, nor excommunicated unless they refused to make
The peace of God 75(^19) Fulcheri Carnotensis Historia Hierosolymitana, ed. H. Hagenmeyer (Heidelberg, 1913),
pp. 61–9; Mansi, Concilia, xx. 815–919, esp. pp. 902–3 (c. 8).
(^20) Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History, ed. and tr. M. Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1969–80), v. 12, 20, vi.262; Ivo’s letter no. 90 in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia
Latina, clxii (Paris, 1889), cols. 111–12; nos. 44 and 62 in Yves de Chartres, Correspondance,
ed. and tr. J. Lerclercq, i (Paris, 1949), 175–85, 259; Hoffmann, Gottesfriede, 226–8, 231–
43.
(^21) Constitutiones, 911–1197, 604 (5).
(^22) Glaber, Histories, 238–9; Bloch, Feudal Society, 365; c. 18 of the Second Lateran Council
of 1139, in Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, 2nd edn. (Freiburg in Breisgau, 1962).
(^23) Constitutiones, 911–1197, 604 (9), 608 ff.