24 George E. Hozuard, 



the most important — expedient by which the national peace 

 was transformed into the peace of the king.^ 



{d). — The Kings Peace. 



In these various ways \\\q. frith or national peace came into 

 existence. But what was the exact signiiicance of the term 

 peace ? What idea did it convey to our predecessors ? A 

 great authority has thus expressed the answer which the 

 sources afford : " The bond which held individuals together, 

 the legal environment (zustand) in which they lived, which 

 surrounded them, was the peace according to the German 

 conception. The peace is the relation in which all stand 

 whilst and in so far as all continue in the union and under 

 the law upon which the community rests. Whoever acts 

 contrary to this commits a breach of the peace. A breach of 

 the peace is unright ; the violation of right is a breach of the 

 peace. Whoever thus breaks the peace, though in respect to 

 a single individual, does violence to all ; for he violates that 

 sacred ordinance (ordnung) under which all stand and through 

 which alone their union has a meaning." ^ 



How utterly incomprehensible to the archaic mind would 

 have been the conception embodied in this definition ! Al- 

 ready, however, when our ancestors settled in Britain, they 

 were beginning to be familiar with it. And the way in 

 which the peace is constantly spoken of in the law-books is 

 curious and instructive. It appears as a vivid, almost objec- 

 tive reality. The very distinctness of the conception shows 

 that it was materialized, viewed in a concrete form. It is 

 another example of the psychological paradox of the Middle 

 Ages, brought out by Mr. Bryce in his discussion of the 

 theory of the Holy Roman Empire.^ The most far-reaching 

 generalizations with a tendency to embody them in concrete 



1 On the higher peaces, see further Stubbs, Co7ist. Hist., I, i8i, note 2; Wilda, 

 Strafrecht, 224-64; Meyer, InstiHitioiis yndiciaires, I, 42-3; Poste's Gains, p. 

 466; Dahn, Deutsche Geschichte, I, 250-1. 



2 Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, I, 391-2. 

 ^ Holy Roman Empire, 89-121. 



258 



