. A popular conciliar movement combining lay and ecclesiastical legislation on the regulation of warfare and the establishment of social peace, the Peace of God has been considered the first popular religious movement of the Middle Ages.
The practice of holding peace councils began in the late 10th century in southern France, in Auvergne, Aquitaine, and Rouergue. During an initial phase of strong enthusiasm, it spread rapidly through most of France and survived in some form until at least the 13th century. The early councils typically took place in large open fields to which relics of saints had been ceremonially paraded. The seniores (high nobility, bishops, abbots) would proclaim peace legislation designed to protect civilians, such as unarmed clerics, peasants, merchants, pilgrims, and women, from the violence and expropriations of the warrior class of lords, castellans, and knights. This proclamation often took the form of an oath, sworn on relics by the fighting classes in the presence of the assembled crowd.
The peace movement’s almost messianic expectations (regulating warfare through collective voluntary commitments), generated enthusiasm at the councils themselves but in the long run failed to eliminate the violence of the landholding and weapon-bearing classes. As a result, despite the initial determination to hold peace councils at regular intervals of five years, the practice gradually declined. By the later 11th century, more effective and long-lasting movements, such as papal reform, the communal movement, and the Crusades, replaced the Peace of God at the center of European concerns.
Each of these later developments deployed characteristic elements of the Peace (collective oaths, sanctified violence) to more limited and effective ends. All of them share with the Peace elements that suggest they are all part of a larger social transformation at work in the 11th and 12th centuries—the importance of an informed and active public, autonomy of popular initiatives, and collective religious enthusiasm.
Cowdrey, Herbert E.J. “The Peace and Truce of God in the Eleventh Century.” Past and Present 46(1970):42–67.
Duby, Georges. The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977, pp. 123–33.
Goetz, Hans Werner. “Kirchenschutz, Rechtswahrung und Reform: Zu den Zielen und zum wesen der frühen Gottesfied-ensbewegung in Frankreich.” Francia 11(1983):193–239.
Head, Thomas, and Richard Landes, eds. Essays on the Peace of God: The Church and the People in Eleventh Century France. Special edition of Historical Reflections/Réflections historiques 14(1987).
Huberti, Ludwig. Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte der Gottesfrieden und Landfrieden. Ansbach: Brugel, 1892.
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