amends.^24 In the place of bishop and count the prior of Cluny tried
crimes against the peace within the great abbey’s lands, convening a
special court of six or seven experienced monks and the same number
of lay vassals.^25 And in the Gevaudan, the bishop and a lay lord chose
twelve justices ‘to judge the disputes of all those coming into the
peace’.^26 Paziersemerged in other parts of France. At Montpellier they
were to assemble every year at the beginning of May to hear complaints,
make decisions about the law, and ask the bishop to excommunicate the
guilty. To support the work, a tax known as the compensum pacis,
which disappeared only in 1789, was assessed on heads of houses and
their cattle: in the case of the Gevaudan it was collected at the cathedral
in Mende, in a chest to which the bishop and certain lay lords held
separate keys.^27 At the end of the century Bishop Ivo of Chartres told
Count Stephen of Blois ‘for the third time’ that he must submit the
differences between them to the judges who had sworn to make just
judgments concerning the peace.^28 Swearing one’s innocence while
grasping a reliquary was a normal method of trial, for the saint would
take vengeance on the perjuror.^29 The ‘judgment of God’ (judicium Dei)
had been invoked by means of an ordeal long before the eleventh
century, but ordeals spread more widely as a means of trying unfree
peace-breakers. The guilt of accused persons was registered by the
festering of their burns after they had carried hot iron for a number of
paces or by their rejection by the water into which they were lowered at
the ends of ropes.^30
For enforcement the peace of God depended ultimately on the co-
operation of the lay princes and their vassals. The peace movement can
be seen as both an expression of millennial enthusiasm embracing whole
communities of clergy, lay lords, and common people, and as the last
stand of the Carolingian polity, in which count and bishop exercised
coordinate jurisdiction in the face of the rising power of the feudal
lords.^31 According to Ralph Glaber, writing about 1041, it took a
76 The Spread of the Organized Peace
(^24) Patrologia Latina, clxii, col. 107, 277–8; The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, vi.
259.
(^25) G. Duby, ‘Recherches sur l’évolution des institutions judiciaires pendant le xeet xie
siècles dans le sud de la Bourgogne’, Moyen Âge, 52, 53 (1946–7), 172ff.
(^26) C. Brunel, ‘Les Juges de la paix en Gevaudan au milieu du xiesiècle’, Bibliothèque de
l’École des Chartes, 109 (1951).
(^27) A. Joris, ‘La Trêve de Dieu à Liège’, in La Paix, i. 504, 544, for the peace tribunal at
Liège; Brunel, ‘Les Juges de la paix en Gevauden’, 38–9, for the compensum pacis.
(^28) Patrologia Latina, clxii, col. 111.
(^29) Constitutiones, 911–1197, 601 (10), 608 (5); Mansi, Concilia, xix. 600; N. Herrmann-
Mascard, Les Reliques des saintes: Formation coutumière d’un droit(Paris, 1975), 238 ff.
(^30) C. Morris, ‘Judicium Dei: The Social and Political Significance of the Ordeal in the
Eleventh Century’, Studies in Church History, 12 (1975), 99 ff.; R. Bartlett, Trial by Fire and
Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 33, 51–2, 92.
(^31) H.-W. Goetz, ‘Protection of the Church, Defense of the Law, and Reform: On the