some metaphysical idea of universal peace, but in its adaptation to
society as it was actually developing: in the way the peace-oath
reinforced the solidarity of urban communities and the mutual fidelity
of vassals and lords, both lay and ecclesiastical. (The oaths sometimes
included the clause ‘that a man will not betray his lord’.)^11
A century later, the king of France would be on the way to absorb-
ing these lesser peaces into his own, but for the moment the effective
enforcement of the oath was by local associations with potentialities for
conflict as much as for order. The urban communes which would come
to challenge feudal authority owed their origins to the swearing of peace
in times of crisis such as occurred at Corbie in northern France around
the year 1030. The ‘first book of the miracles of Saint Adalhard, abbot
of Corbie’ records that, when fire devastated the church, it was agreed
that the intercession of the saints was needed to appease the anger of the
Supreme Judge. People from each area brought holy relics, and when
they were assembled an unbreakable pact of peace was made, in which
the men of Amiens, with their patron saints, also joined. The peace was
to be for the whole week (not just a truce on holy days), and the men of
Amiens swore to come back annually at the feast of St. Firmin to renew
it. If any disagreement arose among them, it was not to be pursued by
plundering and arson until the count and the bishop had been given a
chance to resolve it at that meeting. So ‘a new religion [i.e. rule of life]
put forth a customary law’, and disputes of all sorts were pacified each
year at rogation-tide at the bringing-together of the saints—‘until from
repeated use, the custom fell into contempt’.^12
The first urban ‘conspiracy which they called a commune’ seems to
have been that formed at Le Mans in 1069/70. Though not described as
a peace, it was sealed by an oath which the townsmen forced upon the
reluctant lords of the region, and punitive expeditions, led by the bishop
and the parish priests of le Mans with their crosses and banners were
mounted against those who opposed the commune’s ‘holy ordinances’.^13
The word communiamay have been applied still earlier to a diocesan
peace association formed by Archbishop Aimo of Bourges after a terri-
fying eclipse of the sun in 1038. The archbishop himself took the
72 The Spread of the Organized Peace
(^11) Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium, Liber III: De Rebus Gestis Gerardi Episcopi, in
MGH Scriptores rerum Germanicarum 7, ed. G. H. Pertz (Hanover, 1846), 474 (27), 480 (37),
481 (41), 482 (46–7), 485 (52), 486–7 (53–4); Pfister, Règne de Robert le Pieux, 170–3;
G. Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, tr. A. Goldhammer (Chicago UP,
1980), pp. 21–43; Strubbe, ‘Le Paix de Dieu dans le Nord de la France’, p. 497.
(^12) Ex libro primo miraculorum S. Adalhardi Abbatis Corbeiensis, in Recueil des historiens,
x. 378–9.
(^13) Ex Gestis Pontificum Cenomannensium, in Recueil des historiens, xii. 539; A. Vermeesch,
Essai sur les origines et la signification de la commune dans le Nord de la France, Studies pre-
sented to the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary
Institutions, 30 (Heule, 1966), 25–41, 81–8; Hoffmann, Gottesfriede, 105–10, 123–5.