at Mass in the church of Bruges on 2 March 1127 Count Charles was
murdered by kinsmen of the provost of the town, against whom the
leading men had given a judgment in the count’s court. The king of
France had to intervene to see the murderers of their lord condemned
and thrown from the highest battlements of the castle, and a new count
installed who was acceptable to himself and to the king of England also,
for the ‘holy and pious Count Charles’ had held fiefs and benefices from
the kings of both realms. Secular peace was now in the hands of royal
overlords who combined feudal power with the authority of anointed
kings.^36
Normandy provides the best example of a transition from God’s
peace to a secular lord’s peace which was territorial in coverage and not
simply the protection of privileged individuals and their property. The
Norse counts of Rouen and dukes of Normandy were enthusiastic
patrons of monasteries and supporters of ecclesiastical reform, but
something of Carolingian administration by vicomteshad been pre-
served in the principality and private war had been kept at bay without
the use of ecclesiastical sanctions. This was true at least until the
troubles which accompanied the minority of William the Bastard, the
future Conqueror of England, who succeeded to the dukedom in 1035.
Probably in 1047, after William’s victory over rebels from lower
Normandy at the battle of Val-ès-Dunes, relics from all over the
province and ‘an infinite concourse of people’ were brought together at
Caen, where the duke and his bishops instituted ‘the peace vulgarly
called the Truce of God’ in Normandy. According to ‘The Miracles of
Saint Ouen’, Rouen’s patron saint, whose relics were no doubt brought
by Duke William’s cousin, the abbot of Saint Ouen, a council met for
two days to discuss ‘the peace of the realm and the state of the common-
wealth’ (de pace regni et statu reipublicae). A peace oath was sworn,
‘everyone rejoiced, especially the peasantry’, and people went home
taking the bodies of the saints with them, Saint Ouen healing a para-
lysed woman on the way. The sanctions prescribed by the synod at Caen
were ecclesiastical ones, but there is no mention of an episcopal court in
the various texts of the proceedings. Moreover, the council gave ‘the
count of the country’ the inestimable advantage over his vassals of
exemption from the ban on warfare during the truce, for it was the
ruler’s business to see the peace was kept.^37
William the Conqueror’s assumption in 1066 of the authority and
78 The Spread of the Organized Peace
(^36) Galbert of Bruges, The Murder of Charles the Good, Count of Flanders, tr. J. B. Ross
(New York: Columbia UP, 1960), 42 ff., 83 ff., 105–9, 251, 312.
(^37) Mansi, Concilia, xix. 597–600; Miracula S. Audoeniin Acta Sanctorum, August, vol. 4,
p. 834; M. de Bouard, ‘Sur les origines de la trêve de Dieu en Normandie’, Annales de
Normandie, 1959, 169–89; D. Bates, Normandy before 1066(London, 1982), 66, 163–4,
174, 176, 195.