ABSTRACT
By the start of the twelfth century, Graham McBain notes that the king’s peace was formally extended throughout the realm, ‘the inevitable result of William I’s requirement in 1086 that all subjects acknowledged his sovereignty or overlordship’. The doctrine of the sovereign’s peace provided a keystone for the development of the early modern British state. The sovereign’s peace was made as the peace. Between the eleventh and the eighteenth century, the sovereign’s peace became the way in which order was made and maintained. As the king’s peace becomes increasingly attributed to the criminal law, a central part of the sovereign order loses its resolution. The sovereign’s peace became the way of modulating the necessity of the sovereign order. As William Blackstone wrote, the peace ‘is the very end and foundation of civil society’ and the sovereign is the ‘fountain of justice and general conservator of the peace of the kingdom’.
