deadly fever to get the lords of Neustria to accept the truce of God at
all;^32 and in 1094 Ivo of Chartres refused to bring his military vassals to
a placitumbetween King Philip I, King William II of England, and
Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, until those knights who had been
excommunicated for breaking the peace had made satisfaction and been
reconciled.^33 Bishop Lambert of Arras, Ivo’s contemporary, informed
the countess of Flanders that he had excommunicated her bailiff at
Bapaume for refusing to give back what he had taken ‘within the peace’
from pilgrims leaving his diocese for Rome: if the countess did not see
that restitution was made the bishop would have to make sure that the
peace statutes were observed and place under an interdict the castle in
which this and many other crimes had been committed.^34
Yet spiritual sanctions alone had limited power to enforce pax et
justitia, and ultimately the bishops had to turn for help to the count of
Flanders or one of the other great lords who saw the value of the peace
of God in building up their principalities. Stories that the count’s
officers hanged, burnt, or boiled in oil knights who stole cows from
peasant-women and merchandise from traders testify to the struggle to
establish a ‘peace of the count’, first of all over the markets and fairs of
economically vibrant Flanders. In 1093 Count Robert the Frisian swore
to uphold the truce of God, forbade castle-building without his
permission, and extended protection more generally to travellers and
the vulnerable. Count Robert II claimed in 1111 to follow the example
of his predecessors in decreeing, with the assent of his leading men, a
‘Flemish peace’ (pacem Flandricam), the declared purpose of which was
to restrain the audacity of the common people by a lex talionis: death
for those who committed or merely threatened arson (an ever-present
terror in a medieval city) and maiming for those who maimed.^35 Charles
the Good, who became count in 1119, took measures for ‘the reforma-
tion of the peace and the reaffirmation of the laws and rights of the
realm’, and ‘little by little a state of peace [pacis statum] was restored,
and by the fourth year of his reign everything flourished’. Yet as he knelt
The peace of God 77Purposes and Character of the Peace of God, 989–1038’, in The Peace of God, 259–60, 270;
R. I. Moore, ‘Postscript: The Peace of God and the Social Revolution’, ibid. 323–5, 342; M.
de Bouard, ‘Sur les origines de la trêve de Dieu en Normandie’, Annales de Normandie, 9
(1959), 188–9; Hoffmann, Gottesfriede, cap. vii: ‘Pax-Milizen’; Vermeesch, Essai sur les
origines et la signification de la commune, 42–77, for diocesan communes; Duby, ‘Recherches
sur l’évolution des institutions judiciaires’, Moyen Âge, 52, 194, and 53, 16, 34–8.
(^32) Glaber, Histories, 238–9.
(^33) Patrologia Latina, clxii, cols. 40–1, 107, 653, 659, 662–3.
(^34) Hoffmann, Gottesfriede, 150 ff.
(^35) Constitutiones, 911–1197, 599–601, 616–17; Hoffmann, Gottesfriede, 143–58;
G. G. Koziol, ‘Monks, Feuds, and the Making of Peace in Eleventh-Century Flanders’,
Historical Reflections, 14 (1987), 531–49; D. Nicholas, Medieval Flanders(London, 1992),
59–62.