administrative resources of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy probably
accounts for the more masterful tone of the statutes of the council
William summoned to Lillebonne at Pentecost 1080. There, ‘by the
king’s foresight and the advice of his barons effective provision was
made for the state of the church of God and of the whole realm.’ First
of all the truce of God was renewed, and this time the bishop was
instructed to enforce it: but if his sentence was disobeyed, the offender’s
lord should compel him to submit to episcopal justice, and if the
lord refused to do this ‘the king’s vicecomes, on being requested by
the bishop, must act without making excuses’. After 1066 the term
vicecomeswas applied to the English sheriff, and the writ to the sheriff
was adopted as the most potent instrument of Anglo-Norman adminis-
tration. In the earliest English register of writs, compiled around 1227,
there is a mandate to the sheriff to arrest a person reported to the king
by a bishop for refusal to submit to ecclesiastical censure. May not
William in 1080 have been extending to the rest of his realm a device of
English royal government?^38
The peace of the land
The truce of God was never formally promulgated in England, perhaps
because private war did not become an overwhelming threat. But the
earlier type of communal peace movement is discernible in London, the
only town in England capable of supporting it—in fact some time before
the French examples. Between 930 and 940 ‘the bishops and reeves who
belong to London’ agreed to an ordinance for the running of their
‘peace-gild’ (fridgegyldum), and the nobles and ceorls confirmed it by
giving pledges. A thief over twelve years of age who stole more than
12 d. in value was to be killed and his goods confiscated; and everybody
was to be ‘of one friendship and one enmity’ in pursuing thieves under
the leadership of tithing-men and hundredmen and in contributing to
funds to support the gild’s activities. This is a detailed set of regulations
for catching and punishing thieves in an area centred on the city but
which the reference to ‘bishops’ in the plural suggests was wider than
the diocese of London itself. And one fact made it different from French
peace-keeping communes: it was a local application of a general law
made by King Athelstan, ‘first at Grately and again at Exeter’, for the
peace of all the folk in every shire. When the execution of men as young
The peace of the land 79(^38) Mansi, Concilia, xix. 597–8; de Bouard, ‘Sur les origines’, 187; The Ecclesiastical History
of Orderic Vitalis, iii. 24–35; Early Registers of Writs, ed. E. de Haas and G. D. G. Hall,
Selden Soc. 87 (London, 1970), 15 (48); for a discussion of the nature of the Anglo-Norman
realm or ‘state’ see C. W. Hollister in Speculum, 51 (1976), J. Campbell in Francia, 9 (1980),
and D. Bates in two articles in EHR100 (1985) and 104 (1989).