A concern voiced in many of the studies in this volume is the extent to which concepts of immunity are bound up with questions of property and power; hence the need to clear the ground around this subject in an introductory note. As we have seen, discussions about the medieval immunity usually treat the subject as an essentially Frankish phenomenon. In order to say more about the nature and early development of immunities, and to explain more fully some of the issues raised in the introduction to the subject, it is sensible to begin with their origins in seventh-century Francia, and to try to understand both the purposes they originally served and the historical context in which they developed. It is upon this area that the present chapter focusses, and after a few preliminary remarks about current debates in this subject area, it will look at the early history of royal immunities before attempting to assess their historical significance from a new angle.

That Frankish immunities were somehow very important in the development of medieval Europe is a common assumption in outline histories of medieval society. Such overviews tend to be dialectical, that is, they look for the seeds of later developments in a period of history which is seen as transitional. In Francia, this is the Merovingian period (481–751) which ‘comes between’ antiquity and the middle ages proper, and the seed here is the immunity. One can see why royal immunities might be thus regarded: by granting rights of immunity to landowners from the seventh century onwards, rulers apparently conferred upon them those judicial rights which gave them complete power over their property.