was expected to be ready to confirm the rights of those whose title-deeds
were stolen or destroyed in war, and his first business on his accession
was to confirm the charters of previous rulers granting liberties to
churches: a confirmation which would eventually be extended to the
traditional liberties of the lay barons and the people at large.^18 Kings
saw that it pertained ad stabilitatem regni nostrito confirm the grants
of their predecessors to holy places; monks prayed for the kingdom’s
stability; lay as well as ecclesiastical landlords preserved it by their
policing and judging in the lands granted to them.^19 In 814, the Emperor
Louis the Pious granted liberty and protection to Spanish refugees
from the Saracens who had settled in his kingdom, and in 844 Charles
the Bald confirmed to them immunity and the right to be judged in
their own courts by their own customs, ‘for the lasting and prosperous
stability of the kingdom given us by God’.^20
The development of grants of mundeburdiumor protection com-
pleted the ordering of the kingdom by charters of immunity. The
two types of grant (protection and immunity) multiplied and fused
together in the reign of Louis the Pious (814–40). A collection of
Formulae Imperiales emanating from Louis’s court show how the
beneficiaries’ lands and goods, and all their men wherever they went on
their lords’ business, could be taken ‘under the defence of the king’s pro-
tection and immunity’, to be possessed ‘in quiet order... free from
disturbance by judicial power’.^21 The Carolingian dynasty had built its
authority to a large extent upon its patronage of churches which it took
under its ‘word of protection, immunity and mundeburdium’ and
forbade its own officials to interfere with. A grant of protection to a
bishop and the people of his diocese might include the right to their own
law and custom and thus create a self-governing community, as did
Charlemagne’s to the bishop of Chur (in modern Switzerland) in
772/4.^22 The protection of servants journeying on their lords’ business
Grants of property and protection 15- 30 ; F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols. (Halle, 1903–16), i. 74–5 (41),
ii. 325 (‘Bocland’, 7); H. Brunner, Zur Rechtsgeschichte der römischen und germanischen
Urkunde(Berlin, 1880), 190 ff.; F. M. Stenton, The Latin Charters of the Anglo-Saxon Period
(Oxford UP, 1955), 14; Eric John, Land Tenure in Early England(Leicester UP, 1960), 10; G.
Tessier, Diplomatique royale française(Paris, 1962), 68–9.
(^18) Formulae, 63–5, 150–1, 296 (no. 15), 307. 5 (28), 308. 10 , 311 (32), 323 (48); Capitu-
laria, i. 32. 15 , 36. 33 , 199. 27 , 262. 45 , 289. 29 , 326. 31 , ii. 92. 14 , 268. 17 , 333. 26 , 376 (no.
288), for the wholesale confirmation of immunities by Frankish kings from Peppin in 754/5 to
Eudes, the first non-Carolingian king in France in 888; Pippini etc. Diplomata, 20, 26, 112;
Tessier, Diplomatique, 61–6; A. Harding, ‘Political Liberty in the Middle Ages’, Speculum 55
(1980), 433–4.
(^19) Formulae, 200. 25 , 261. 35 , 499. 35 ; Pippini etc. Diplomata, 175.
(^20) Capitularia, i. 261–3, ii. 258–60; Kroell, L’Immunité franque, 206.
(^21) Formulae, 296 (no. 15), 306–7 (28), 311 (32), 323 (48), especially 307. 5 and 308. 10 ;
Tessier, Diplomatique, 61–6; Harding, ‘Political Liberty’, 433–4.
(^22) Examples in Pippini etc. Diplomata, 20 (no. 14), 26 (17), 112 (78).