Medieval commune
The Church and King both had mixed reactions to communes. On the one hand they agreed safety and protection from lawless nobles was in everyones best interest. The communes intention was to keep the peace through the threat of revenge, and the Church was sympathetic to the result of peace. However the Church had their own ways to enforce the peace such as the Peace and Truce of God movement, for example. On the other hand, communes disrupted the order of medieval society. The methods the commune used, eye for an eye, violence begets violence, were generally not acceptable to Church or King. Normally only the noble lords are allowed to fight and the merchant townspeople were the workers, not fighters. There was a sense the communes were a threat to the medieval 3-tiered social order: Those who work, those who pray, those who fight. Communes crossed the line between working and fighting. As such communes were sometimes accepted, and other times not by the Church and King. One of the most famous cases of a commune being suppressed and the resulting defiant urban revolt occurred in the French town of Laon in 1112.