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.The peace-oath proved useful to the papalreform movement in its fight against simony (advancement in the churchby the use of money or social influence), clerical marriage, and otherforms of pollution.18 In 1095, after years of conflict over the investitureof prelates by lay princes, Pope Urban II came into France and held agreat council at Clermont.Fulcher of Chartres reports that in hissermon Urban singled out simoniacal heresy for attack and thenturned to denounce thieves and burners of houses and those who seized bishops, monks, priests, nuns and their servants, or pilgrims ortraders, to despoil them.He had heard that, perhaps due to thebishops own weakness in administering justice, scarcely anyone inFrance dared to travel on the road with hope of safety for fear ofseizure by robbers by day or thieves by night.Wherefore the trucecommonly so-called, which was long ago established by the holyfathers, should be renewed. The varying lists of canons which survivefrom Clermont show that the familiar run of reforming decrees wasindeed prefaced by a peace statute, and that the act for which thecouncil is most famous, the launching of the First Crusade, was an inter-ruption of its normal business.The lasting but incidental result of thecouncil was in fact to bind the hopes of success in war against Islam topeace in Europe: a special three-year truce was declared to protect those16Constitutiones, 911 1197, 596 7, 605 (12); Hoffmann, Gottesfriede, 82.17Mansi, Concilia, xix.827 32.18Constitutiones, 911 1197, 602 16; Hoffmann, Gottesfriede, 70 89, 223, 236; A.G.Remensnyder, Pollution, Purity, and Peace , in The Peace of God, 280 307. The peace of God 75heading for Jerusalem and the property and dependents they left behind,and universal peace among Christian princes proclaimed to allow themto unite against the enemy.19Bishops routinely promulgated the treuga Dei in their dioceses on theauthority of the Council of Clermont, and it was reaffirmed by theLateran councils which popes summoned in 1123, 1139, and 1179, butthe canon law of the whole church was never much concerned with thetruce.The great canonist, Bishop Ivo of Chartres, wrote in 1101 in replyto a question from Archbishop Daimbert of Sens that the truce of Godwas made for the common utility by an assembly of a locality (placitoet pacto civitatis ac patriae), and even a murderer could not be con-demned under the terms of a peace he had not sworn to.The peace ofGod was important in the long term for its development of ideas ofinjuries committed against the common utility and procedures for thetrial and punishment of peace-breakers which would be drawn upon bythe authorities of secular states.20The first object of the truce was to criminalize feudal violence andrapine.Sieges must be inactive during the truce unless the defenderstried to break out.21 The scales of punishment prescribed for peace-breakers began to classify crimes according to their gravity.Churchmengraduated the length and severity of the penances they prescribed,differentiated between exile within the diocese and outside it, and sentthose guilty of the horrible malice of arson to Jerusalem or to fightagainst the moors in Spain.22 It was declared not to be a breach of thepeace to order the caning of a delinquent servant or pupil.At the otherextreme some peace agreements imposed death or the amputation oflimbs for homicide, wounding, the rape of virgins, and major thefts, andit was at this period that blood punishments came to replace monetarypayments as the resolution of feuds.Those who received criminals orfugitive serfs made themselves liable to the same penalties as the peoplethey sheltered, and those guilty of verbal abuse incurred beatings.23But Ivo of Chartres insisted (on the authority of St.Augustine) thatpeace-breakers should not be punished until they had been properlytried and convicted, nor excommunicated unless they refused to make19Fulcheri Carnotensis Historia Hierosolymitana, ed.H.Hagenmeyer (Heidelberg, 1913),pp.61 9; Mansi, Concilia, xx.815 919, esp.pp.902 3 (c.8).20Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History, ed.and tr.M.Chibnall, 6 vols.(Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1969 80), v.12, 20, vi.262; Ivo s letter no.90 in J.-P.Migne, PatrologiaLatina, clxii (Paris, 1889), cols.111 12; nos.44 and 62 in Yves de Chartres, Correspondance,ed.and tr.J.Lerclercq, i (Paris, 1949), 175 85, 259; Hoffmann, Gottesfriede, 226 8, 23143.21Constitutiones, 911 1197, 604 (5).22Glaber, Histories, 238 9; Bloch, Feudal Society, 365; c.18 of the Second Lateran Councilof 1139, in Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, 2nd edn.(Freiburg in Breisgau, 1962).23Constitutiones, 911 1197, 604 (9), 608 ff. 76 The Spread of the Organized Peaceamends.24 In the place of bishop and count the prior of Cluny triedcrimes against the peace within the great abbey s lands, convening aspecial court of six or seven experienced monks and the same numberof lay vassals.25 And in the Gevaudan, the bishop and a lay lord chosetwelve justices to judge the disputes of all those coming into thepeace.26 Paziers emerged in other parts of France.At Montpellier theywere to assemble every year at the beginning of May to hear complaints,make decisions about the law, and ask the bishop to excommunicate theguilty.To support the work, a tax known as the compensum pacis,which disappeared only in 1789, was assessed on heads of houses andtheir cattle: in the case of the Gevaudan it was collected at the cathedralin Mende, in a chest to which the bishop and certain lay lords heldseparate keys.27 At the end of the century Bishop Ivo of Chartres toldCount Stephen of Blois for the third time that he must submit thedifferences between them to the judges who had sworn to make justjudgments concerning the peace.28 Swearing one s innocence whilegrasping a reliquary was a normal method of trial, for the saint wouldtake vengeance on the perjuror.29 The judgment of God (judicium Dei)had been invoked by means of an ordeal long before the eleventhcentury, but ordeals spread more widely as a means of trying unfreepeace-breakers
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