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.Edgar waswilling to allow the Danes their own good laws, but his decree aboutcattle-stealing was to be common to the whole land; secular rights(woruldgerihta) were to be enforced in every province for the sake ofGod and  my full kingship , and for the benefit and security of poor andrich (to earmum and eadegum to dearfe and to fride).It was the king sbusiness above all to will the decisions his councillors made for theimprovement of the peace legislation which involved sending copies ofthe laws to Earl Oslac and the men of Northumbria, and to the ealdor-men of Mercia and East Anglia, who were  to send them in all direc-tions.80 King Ethelred continued to legislate for the peace of the wholepeople  according to English law (aefter Engla lage), and his royalconcerns that his people should enjoy right law, maintain peace andfriendship and a single good coinage, and be zealous in the repair ofboroughs and military service were taken up by the supplanter of hisdynasty, the Danish King Cnut, who hardly needed the authority of aletter from the pope to suppress  unright and  establish full peace every-where (full frid wyrcean).81There was nevertheless an ebbing of security in Ethelred s reign,which exposed the kernels of protection exercised by powerful men overparticular places and occasions as the real foundations of public order.Apparently with the Danes had come a new word grid, which served todistinguish the special peace under the great lord s mund from theabstract ideal of frid.82 The peace within the walls of a church becamecyricgrid, and royal protection was cyninges handgrid (peace given bythe king s own hand).83 For the implementation of his treaty with theDanes in 991, Ethelred relied heavily on the peace of the burgh, whichseemed to spread outwards from the defensible house of the king, andhe set out just how merchant ships might be admitted to a fridbyrig( curiam pacis in the post-Conquest translation).In his Wantage lawsfor the Danelaw, Ethelred declared that breach of the peace given by hishand could not be atoned for with money, if his grid was to remain asfirm as in the days of his ancestors.But there was also the grid whichthe ealdorman and the king s reeve gave in the meeting of the FiveBoroughs, and that which was given in a single borough, and in ahundred or wapentake, and in an alehouse there was an appropriate80Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, i.202 3 (III Eg.5), 208 9, 212, 214 15 (IVEg.2; 12,1; 14 16).81Ibid.i.216 (I Atr.pro.), 220, 222, 224 (II Atr.Pro.1; 5,2; 7,2), 237, 242 (V Atr.1; 26,1),273 (Cn.1020, 3), 314 (II Cn., 8).82Ibid.ii.642 (3a).83Ibid.i.128 (Pro.1), 160 (20,3), 188 9 (5 6).30 Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Justicefine for breaching each of them.84 The  king s full mundbryce wasreserved for damaging the king s ships, and above all for breakingchurch-peace, the essential gridbryce, for the king s function was aboveall to gridian and fripian churches.85Grid and mund merged into each other, to the extent that they wereconflated in the Latin translator s pax.Cnut placed mundbrice (id est,infractionem pacis, said the translator:  that is, breach of the peace ) atthe head of the list of the rights or pleas in the king s personal juris-diction, followed by attacks on homesteads, lying in ambush, theharbouring of fugitives, and neglect of military service.To start with,the king s mund was simply more valuable than the mund of an arch-bishop or royal prince, as his personal power was greater, and themundbryce of archbishop and prince was in turn costlier than a bishop sor an ealdorman s.But through the developing legal processes, the royalmund flowed to fill the interstices between the local  griths enforced bypowerful aristocrats, cementing them into a single public peace.86 Theidea of the king s public authority was abstracted from his concreteexercise of judicial power.Peace was something that wrongdoers as wellas their victims were entitled to receive from the king when they cameto argue their cases in his courts.Grid under the king s mund wasguaranteed by King Edmund to a killer once he had pledged himself topay the wergild; and it was burghbryce if a wronged person resorted toforce without first demanding justice.Cnut conferred a special grid onanyone but a proven thief going to or from court ( that is, to aplacitum , says the translator).87 A century the other side of the NormanConquest, Henry II s novel procedure for deciding questions of right toland, the Grand Assize, began with the suing out of a  writ of peace bythe sitting tenant, to stop the customary method of trial by battle.88Only the king wielded this peace: no one else might receive an outlaw,a fridleasan man, back into the public peace.Pax regis was an abstrac-tion from the workings of grid and mund in legal proceedings andlargely independent of the Roman and ecclesiastical ideal of peace,though it could invoke the support of that ideal when necessary.8984Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, i.222 (2,1), 228 32 (1; 13; 15), 234 5 (4,1),254 5 (34), 258 (42,3), 263 4 (3; 4,1; 5,1), 282 3 (2,5), ii.28, 642 (3a); F.W.Maitland,Domesday Book and Beyond (Cambridge UP, 1897: repr.Fontana Library 1960), 225 6, 235.85Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, i.254 5 (34), 258 (42,3), 263 4 (3; 4,1;865,1), 282 3 (2,5).Ibid.i.316 17 (12).87Ibid.i.190 (7), 234 5 (4,1), 366 7 (82).88Glanvill, ed.Hall, 29.89Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, i.274 (Cnut, 1020, 12) 316 19 (II Cnut, 12,13, 15a), 470 3 (a treatise of 1028 × 1070 Be gride y be munde), 366 7 (82); Glanvill, ed.Hall, 29; for sanctuary (fridsocn), see Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 124; alsoF.Pollock and F.W.Maitland, History of English Law before the time of Edward I, 2nd edn.,2 vols.(Cambridge UP, 1898), ii.590 1.Legal order 31legal orderEnglish developments may help us to understand what had happenedearlier in the Frankish empire [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]