In the days before the attainment of English unity, the maintenance of the peace was the care of certain local institutions and bodies, the nature of which need not here be specified. The Anglo-Saxon period of our history being one of continual change and gradual development, the maintenance of the peace cannot be treated as a homogeneous whole before the various arrangements which secured it had been consolidated, and, for the first time reduced to a system, by Edgar. From this time onwards, however, the whole of the now united England may be said to have enjoyed a general guarantee for public order under the name of the "King's Peace," so called because the king guaranteed, or at least promised, to his subjects, a state of peace and security in return for the allegiance which he demanded from them.[4] As "the highest maintainer of the peace," the king claimed an actual police supremacy, and was not content with a mere title. Moreover, by virtue of his position as Commander-in-Chief, he had the power of enforcing compliance with the rules of the peace, of which he was the chief guardian and exponent. An English king was not only the hereditary ruler of his people, he was their chosen chief magistrate also. The idea that the peace and orderliness of the kingdom intimately depended upon the personality of its ruler was so deeply rooted that, at his death, the "King's Peace" was held to have lapsed, and, on their accession, English sovereigns were wont to make proclamation afresh of "general peace orders," an example which was followed by William the Conqueror and his successors.[5] Referring to the death of Henry I., a chronicler writes: "The king died on the following day after St Andrew's mass day, in Normandy, then there was tribulation in the land, for every man that could, forthwith robbed another ... a good man he was, and there was great awe of him. No man durst misdo against another in his time. He made peace for man and beast."[6] The King's Peace was of two kinds: there was the public peace of the realm, common to all men; and there was the private peace proper to the king himself, designed to safeguard his person, to uphold his dignity, and to secure his interests in every way. This royal peace, as it may be called, was especially concerned with certain places, seasons, and individuals; a special measure of protection was accordingly extended to the king and his nobles, to nuns, widows and clergy; whilst breaches of the peace which occurred on Coronation days, on Fast days, and the like, or which were committed in the vicinity of the royal palaces or upon the "King's Highway," received exemplary punishment from the royal judges. The public peace, on the other hand, afforded protection to all alike, to the exclusion only of the "unfrith," as those men were called whose crimes placed them without the pale of society, or who, holding no land, yet failed to enrol themselves in a "tything."