authority is the increasing use of fredus, a German word with a Latin
ending. From as far back as we can see amongst the Germanic peoples,
compensation to injured parties was accompanied by payments to the
chieftains who lent their power to the customary procedures and whose
authority might also be regarded as damaged by wrongful acts. As the
king emphasized the responsibility of these men to himself, so he
asserted his right to the fredus. The Lex Ribuariaordered that the fine
should not be taken until compensation was paid to the private victim
of the injury; but then a third of the sum was to be pledged before
witnesses to the king’s fisc (not given to the judge), ‘so that firm
peace shall endure forever’ (ut pax perpetua stabilis permaneat).^71 The
criminal jurisdiction of private lords, monastic and secular, was based
on royal grants of immunity from payment of the fredusby the inhabi-
tants of their estates: the lords got the fines, and with them the
peace-keeping duties.^72 Legislation also grew from the adjusting of the
fredusto the relative gravity of the injury. In England at the end of
the ninth century, King Alfred prefaced his laws with a history of
law-making, to show how he was building on the work of his prede-
cessors, the wise men who ‘fixed the compensations for many human
misdeeds’, writing them ‘in many synod-books, here one law, there
another’.^73
The Germanic idea of peace is clearest in the Anglo-Saxon laws.
These were promulgated in the vernacular but translated into Latin
within fifty years of the Norman Conquest,^74 so that we can follow the
interpretation of English institutions by a churchman with a broader
Frankish perspective. The term in the English laws most commonly
translated as paxis frid, which is the obvious root of fredus. Fridmay
be established between nations, as Alfred and Guthrum swore it for the
Angles and the Danes of East Anglia ‘and for their offspring’.^75 Alfred’s
and Guthrum’s peace began a process more fundamental, however, than
the reconciliation of the Danish invaders. To bring the Norse areas
under control in the tenth century, the Wessex kings created the
administrative order of a new kingdom of England, buttressed by a
system of law-courts. Alfred’s son Edward (899–924) urged his witan to
consider how their fridmight be better kept, and his earlier provisions
for it fulfilled. Edward himself initiated a special fine (oferhyrnesse) for
Keeping the peace 27(^71) Niermeyer, lexicon minus, sub v. fredus; Lex Ribuaria, ed. F. Beyerle and R. Buchner,
MGH Legum Sectio 1, iii. 2 (Hanover, 1954), 134.
(^72) Diplomata... Merowingica, no. 95 (p. 86).
(^73) Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, i. 46–7 (Intro. 49.8).
(^74) Leges Henrici Primi, ed. and tr. L. J. Downer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 35–6; for
the Anglo-Saxon laws, P. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth
Century, is now the essential guide.
(^75) Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, i. 126–9 (AGu. pro., 5; EGu. pro.).