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royal government. They imposed their own jurisdiction on their neighbors
and forced them, often with brute force, to submit to dues and obligations
of various sorts, including hospitality. These were quickly styled as ‘bad
customs’, mala or pravae consuetudines.19 Moreover, in the course of the
high Middle Ages a fast-rising population left many aristocratic younger
sons without hope for landed inheritance and traditional establishment.
Many of them had few career choices but to enter the universities in
the cities and become clerics and courtiers in the rising bureaucracies of
secular and ecclesiastical lords. Others chose to try their luck as knights
in the service of lords high and low. Especially before many of them were
channeled into crusades outside Europe from the close of the eleventh
century onwards, their local presence did anything but promote social and
political stability or reduce violence. At the same time, nobles, higher lords,
and other political superiors continued to practice conventional means of
displaying their power and mobilizing resources in their favor by exacting
hospitality and upkeep in various forms.
Already in the late tenth century and the early eleventh, popular and
ecclesiastical peace movements began to spread all over Western Europe.
The Peace and Truce of God, pax et treuga dei, sought to limit and regulate
the use of violence and armed forces and turned against the arbitrary use of
political power against non-belligerents and common people. It promoted
public peace.20 However, these popular movements, initially spreading
from southern France and reaching the Empire, soon fed into royal and
princely initiatives for administering criminal justice and protecting public
order. Quite prominently, curbing violence in the form of forced hospital-
ity became part of royal and princely legislative agendas. In the Empire,
for example, it became part of the Landfrieden movement (constitutio pacis
or pax jurata), which likewise sought to circumscribe feuds and promote
19 These topics have featured prominently in the continued debates on or relating to the
‘feudal revolution/mutation’. Its scholarship is enormous. For a relatively recent syn-
thesis of much of it, see Charles West, Reframing the Feudal Revolution: Political and
Social Transformation Between Marne and Moselle, c. 800‒c. 1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013).
20 See Geoffrey Koziol, The Peace of God, Past Imperfect (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press,
2018), and Thomas Head and Richard Landes, eds., The Peace of God: Social Violence and
Religious Response in France around the Year 1000 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).