An excerpt from, "Anglo-Saxon Period of English Law II" By A. H. F. Lefroy, The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 26, No. 5 (Mar., 1917):
Preservation of the peace and punishment of offenders were dealt with in England, as elsewhere, partly under the customary jurisdiction of the local courts, partly by the special authority of the king. The expression "the King's peace," even now used in every indictment, comes to us from the Saxons. The origin of it is to be traced to the notion that a stranger who broke the peace of a house must make atonement to the head of that house. But in the Anglo-Saxon period the king's peace was not for all men or all places. In England probably as late as the Norman Conquest each househod had its individual "peace." The peace of the king was one thing, the peace of the lord of the manor, the peace of the churches, the peace of the sheriff, the peace of the homestead, were all quite other things: a multitude of jurisdictions imposed peace in a multitude of areas in a multitude of ways. But in no area was "peace" a verbal contrast with war: rather it conveyed the idea, dimly mirrored it may be, in the minds of men, of wholeness and soundness within the area whatever its size might be. But breach of the kings' peace was a much graver matter than an ordinary breach of public order. It made the wrongdoer the king's enemy. After the Norman Conquest the king's peace became the normal and general safeguard of public order. Slowly the idea of a "general peace" embracing the "peace" of the various customary jurisdictions was evolved, and the king's peace in the course of time coincided with this general peace. All jurisdictions, including that of the churches, were gradually absorbed by the king's peace, which became, in the process of centuries, the peace first of England, then of all the Isles, and with the onward expansion of the race, of all the king's dominions oversea. The movement of absorption, long since practically concluded in England-though there manorial courts still possess a "peace" that is not the king's-may be observed in active operation to-day in the Empire of India.
The first extension of the Pax Regis beyond the royal residence was by a proclamation that the king's peace should be observed in all the land during the week of the coronation, at Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide in every year. The next step was that the king could proclaim his peace in any particular locality. Offences against the king personally, e. g., treason, were always breaches of his peace.
The violation of the king's peace was the original offence from which the jurisdiction of the sovereign in criminal matters arose; and not only was it the practice that the king's justices should try breaches of his peace, but also that the king should be a party to the plea. It finally became the practice to allege every criminal wrong as being contra pacem domini regis; but there is good reason to suppose that felonies were at first the only crimes contra pacem, or, conversely, that crimes contra paccm were originally all felonies. The prosecution of violators of the peace by the sovereign sprang not so much from the Norman conception of the king as the foundation of justice, as from the Saxon idea of compensation to the sufferer for a wrong done.
If you injured me you must pay the b6t. If you injured the king by violating his peace, you must pay the fine due to him, and he, therefore, prosecuted.
For in Anglo-Saxon as well as in other Germanic laws, we find that the idea of wrong to a person or his kindred is still primary, and that of offence against the common weal secondary even in the gravest cases. Homicide appears in the AngloSaxon dooms as a matter for composition in the ordinary case of slaying in open quarrel. There are additional public penalties in aggravated cases, as when a man is slain in the king's presence, or otherwise in breach of the king's peace. But treason to one's lord, especially to the king, is a capital crime. A freeman's life has a regular value set upon it, called wergild, literally "man"s price," or "man-payment," or wer simply; while for injuries to the person short of death there is an elaborate tariff; for an eye so much, for a broken arm so much, and so on. To explain the phraseology of the time:
Wer was the pecuniary value set on a man's life increasing with his rank. It was also the measure of the fines payable by him for his own offences; for as the life of an earl was more precious than that of many ceorls, so his offences were the more grave.
An excerpt from, "The King's Peace, the Royal Prerogative and Public Order: The Roots and Early Development of Binding over Powers" By David Feldman, The Cambridge Law Journal, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Mar., 1988):
Not only did the king's surroundings acquire special importance, but by the late seventh century he comes to have a recognised interest in peacekeeping elsewhere. In KentX the Laws of Hlothzr and Eadric, cc 11-13 imposed three separate fines on someone who insulted a guest in another's house or uncivilly removed a person's cup where men were dnnking: one went to the host one to the householder and one to the king. If a weapon was drawn, and no injury was done fines went to the householder and the king By the time of Cnut (1016-1035), hamsocn (the right to receive a fine for housebreaking) was a recognised right of the king both in Wessex and in the Danelaw.
The idea was developing that the king's peace extended beyond the immediate surroundings of his court. The best account of the development has been provided by Sir Frederick Pollock. The king first brought under his protection the locality surrounding his court: in the eleventh century his peace extended within a radius of three miles, three and a bit furlongs of his residence. By the time of William I, the king's peace protected travellers on the four great Roman roads: Watling Street, Erming Street, Hykenild or Icknield Way and Foss Way. Other roads were in the sheriff's peace, but gradually came within the king's peace by the end of the fourteenth century.
Following the Norman Conquest, the "king's peace" had extended to refer to "the normal and general safeguard of public order" in the realm, although specially granted peaces continued to be given after this period. Under the Leges Edwardi Confessoris (Laws of Edward the Confessor), the four great highways of the realm (the Roman roads of Watling Street, Icknield Street, Ermine Street, and Fosse Way) as well as navigable rivers were also under the king's peace. The Leges Edwardi Confessoris provided that the weeks for Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost were under the king's peace as well. Maitland commented that the king's peace had begun to "swallow up lesser peaces" such as the peaces of local lords of the manor. For example, roads other than the four great Roman roads were formerly under the sheriffs' peace, but by the end of the 14th century had been brought under the king's peace.
An excerpt from, "God's Peace and King's Peace: The Laws of Edward the Confessor" By Bruce R. O'Brien, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, Pg. 8 - 9:
THE KINDS OF PARLIAMENTARY QUARRELS and constitutional debates that five hundred years later would elevate the Leges Edwardi to the status of important evidence of Parliament's continuity beyond the Norman Conquest were far from the mind of its author. Instead, he was driven by powerful memories of the events of the recent past. The better part of a century had passed since Duke William and his invasion fleet had sailed from Saint-Valéry on 27 September 1066, setting out, like Agamemnon (thought the Conqueror's panegyrist, William of Poitiers), "to avenge the insult to his brother's bed."¹ Those had been momentous years. They had seen the protracted conquest of England and settlement of the Conqueror's men- the Normans, Flemings, Bretons, and other allies-on the estates of dead, dispossessed, or outlawed English warriors and lords. They had heard, too often for Norman complacency, of the gathering of Scandinavian invasion fleets much like those that had carried Cnut's conquering army to England in 1016; four times these fleets sailed, though with little lasting effect.
This was a time of rebellions by ambitious English and Norman barons and of wars between members of the royal family itself, intermittently between William II (1087-1100) and Henry I (1100-1135) of England and their brother Robert, duke of Normandy, and more widely between King Stephen and Matilda, daughter of Henry I, and later her son Henry of Anjou, between 1135 and 1154. The chronicles give the impression, perhaps intended, of an England beset by biblical plagues: in 1077, "wild fire came upon many shires and burned down many villages"; five years later a "great famine" struck; four years after that came a cattle plague accompanied by tremendous thunderstorms in which many people died. Some witnessed a man-made plague: the castling of England. Within twenty years of the conquest, over eighty had been built, and, as one of the native chroniclers lamented, "after that it grew much worse." Not all change carried overtones of divine punishment. The population by modern estimates grew at a tremendous rate, and new religious orders were founded on the continent and imported to fill the landscape with monasteries, priories, and cells. Whether violent or peaceful, plague, population, and new neighbors all put a strain on an English society familiar with past invasions but grown accustomed in the last half century to peace and some prosperity. Voices of complaint and praise concerning Norman rule create a cacophony in the sources. Which voices the author of the Leges Edwardi heard would have depended on when he entered the hall and where he sat to listen.
The conquest changed a great deal in English life. William of Poitiers intoned that in 1066 "the blood-stained battleground was covered with the flower of the youth and nobility of England." The defeated were not immediately replaced as a class, but through forfeits, grants, and deaths without heirs, only a few Englishmen remained among the over two hundred major landowners recorded in Domesday Book in 1086. The consequences of this replacement of the highest level of aristocracy in England by William I's followers has been hotly debated by historians for centuries. No consensus has been reached, nor is one likely at any point in the future. Given how little is known about individual postconquest lords, their assumption of their predecessors' rights, or their relationships with their tenants, generalizations about these consequences are difficult to make with any conviction. Nevertheless, some observations can be ventured. The change in the aristocracy meant necessarily a change in aristocratic values, if not in rights and duties. For instance, those nobles who remained, whatever their descent or language, soon conformed to a new code of conduct called "chivalry," which meant that whereas in the past death was likely to follow defeat in war or rebellion, now the vanquished could expect mercy. Some of the broader changes England underwent were not fully grasped in 1100 or even in 1150. The shift of political axis from the North Sea, where England's relations with the Scandinavians had tied it since at least the early eleventh century, to France and then, after the beginning of the crusades, to the Mediterranean, wrought changes too subtle to have been clearly perceptible in a single lifetime.