Definition
"The peace" is a term of art in English and American common law denoting the state of public order and tranquility that the sovereign — originally the Crown, later the state — has an interest in maintaining. It operates as the legal baseline against which disturbances, threats, and criminal conduct are measured. To act "against the peace" was the traditional pleading formula signaling that conduct violated the public order the law protects.
The concept operates in two related senses:
1. The public order itself. "The peace" refers to the condition of civil tranquility that the law treats as belonging to the sovereign and owed to the community. Criminal accusations at common law were framed as breaches "against the peace of our lord the King" (or, in American practice, "against the peace and dignity of the state") — language that survived as a formal pleading element long after its substantive significance faded.
2. The legal status of being peaceable. A person who has not disturbed the public order is said to "keep the peace." Courts could bind individuals to keep the peace by surety — a recognizance requiring the person to abstain from conduct that would breach public tranquility. Magistrates, justices of the peace, and later designated officers exercised authority derived directly from this concept.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Peace" in ordinary English means freedom from disturbance, conflict, or war; a state of quiet and calm; the absence of violence or hostility.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Freedom from disturbance or agitation; calm; quiet; as, the peace of a placid lake." Also: "Public quiet, order, and tranquility; freedom from civil disturbance."
For once, common and legal meanings are close — but the gap lies in sovereignty and enforceability. In ordinary usage, peace is a condition or a feeling. In law, "the peace" is a legal interest belonging to the sovereign, capable of being breached, bound, or conserved through formal legal process. The distinction matters most when reading historical pleadings, recognizances, and the authority of officers designated as "conservators of the peace."
Common Confusion
The peace should not be confused with peace in a general moral or diplomatic sense. In legal sources, phrases like "breach of the peace," "surety of the peace," "conservator of the peace," and "justice of the peace" are technical terms with defined procedural content. Researchers sometimes read the word loosely in historical documents and miss that a specific legal mechanism — binding over, recognizance, or criminal charge — is in operation. Each phrase carries its own doctrinal history and should be pursued as a separate entry.
Why It Matters in Research
The phrase "the peace" is load-bearing in historical criminal pleading. Before modern criminal codes eliminated archaic formulas, every indictment concluded with words to the effect that the offense was committed "against the peace and dignity of the State." Researchers reading colonial, antebellum, or early common-law materials must recognize this as a formal pleading requirement, not mere rhetorical flourish — its absence could be grounds for a motion to quash.
The concept also anchors a cluster of procedural mechanisms — surety of the peace, breach of the peace, conservators of the peace — that appear throughout English and early American law and are treated in separate entries. When Burrill's Law Dictionary redirects "the peace" to "Conservator of the peace," it signals that Burrill treats the institutional dimension as primary. Black's 2nd Ed. entry, by contrast, conflates the term with a Pennsylvania court, which reflects a historical accident of how the entry was structured in that edition rather than a standard meaning.
Researchers using Black's 2nd Ed. should be aware that its entry under this heading describes Pennsylvania's Court of Quarter Sessions in a truncated form — not a general definition of "the peace" as a legal concept. This is a known artifact of that edition's organization and should not be read as authoritative on the concept itself.
For corpus searches, "the peace" rarely appears in isolation as a searchable term. It appears as a component of compound phrases. Search strategies should target "breach of the peace," "surety of the peace," "bind to the peace," "against the peace," and "conservator of the peace" as distinct queries.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill takes a cross-reference approach, routing the reader to "Conservator of the peace" without defining the underlying concept in this entry. This is consistent with Burrill's general method of organizing around institutional actors rather than abstract doctrinal terms, but it means the researcher must chase the concept across multiple entries.
Black's 2nd Ed. presents a more significant editorial problem: the entry as it appears in the source material describes Pennsylvania's Court of Quarter Sessions — a specific tribunal — under the heading "The Peace." This appears to be an incomplete or misattributed entry rather than a considered definition of the concept. Neither source provides a modern-usable synthesis of what "the peace" means as a foundational legal idea.
Both dictionaries, read together, reflect an older tradition in which "the peace" was so fundamental to common-law criminal practice that lexicographers assumed practitioners already understood it, requiring only institutional and procedural guidance rather than a core definition. Modern researchers should not take that assumption forward.
Jurisdictional Note
In American law, "the dignity of the State" replaced "the peace of our Lord the King" in criminal pleading formulas after independence, but the substantive concept remained intact. Some states retained more archaic language longer than others; Pennsylvania's court structure, referenced in Black's 2nd Ed., is a state-specific institutional expression of the broader concept rather than representative of general American practice.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia: Disorderly Conduct and Breach of Peace (criminal_107)