monthly); the borough, to meet three times a year; and the shire court
(expounding both ecclesiastical and secular law under the joint presi-
dency of bishop and ealdorman) to meet twice a year. Edgar was
willing to allow the Danes their own good laws, but his decree about
cattle-stealing was to be common to the whole land; secular rights
(woruldgerihta) were to be enforced in every province for the sake of
God and ‘my full kingship’, and for the benefit and security of poor and
rich (to earmum and eadegum to dearfe and to fride). It was the king’s
business above all to will the decisions his councillors made for the
improvement of the peace—legislation which involved sending copies of
the laws to Earl Oslac and the men of Northumbria, and to the ealdor-
men of Mercia and East Anglia, who were ‘to send them in all direc-
tions’.^80 King Ethelred continued to legislate for the peace of the whole
people ‘according to English law’ (aefter Engla lage), and his royal
concerns—that his people should enjoy right law, maintain peace and
friendship and a single good coinage, and be zealous in the repair of
boroughs and military service—were taken up by the supplanter of his
dynasty, the Danish King Cnut, who hardly needed the authority of a
letter from the pope to suppress ‘unright’ and ‘establish full peace every-
where’ (full fridwyrcean).^81
There was nevertheless an ebbing of security in Ethelred’s reign,
which exposed the kernels of protection exercised by powerful men over
particular places and occasions as the real foundations of public order.
Apparently with the Danes had come a new word grid, which served to
distinguish the special peace under the great lord’s mundfrom the
abstract ideal of frid.^82 The peace within the walls of a church became
cyricgrid, and royal protection was cyninges handgrid(peace given by
the king’s own hand).^83 For the implementation of his treaty with the
Danes in 991, Ethelred relied heavily on the peace of the burgh, which
seemed to spread outwards from the defensible house of the king, and
he set out just how merchant ships might be admitted to a fridbyrig
(‘curiam pacis’ in the post-Conquest translation). In his Wantage laws
for the Danelaw, Ethelred declared that breach of the peace given by his
hand could not be atoned for with money, if his gridwas to remain as
firm as in the days of his ancestors. But there was also the gridwhich
the ealdorman and the king’s reeve gave in the meeting of the Five
Boroughs, and that which was given in a single borough, and in a
hundred or wapentake, and in an alehouse—there was an appropriate
Keeping the peace 29(^80) Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, i. 202–3 (III Eg. 5), 208–9, 212, 214–15 (IV
Eg. 2; 12,1; 14–16).
(^81) Ibid. i. 216 (I Atr. pro.), 220, 222, 224 (II Atr. Pro.1; 5,2; 7,2), 237, 242 (V Atr. 1; 26,1),
273 (Cn. 1020, 3), 314 (II Cn., 8).
(^82) Ibid. ii. 642 (3a).
(^83) Ibid.i. 128 (Pro.1), 160 (20,3), 188–9 (5–6).