gave rise to the most familiar of personal privileges, and one of great
economic importance: the protection and freedom from tolls bestowed
on groups of merchants. Joining it to immunity (a privilege exercised
within a specific territory) made the protection ‘real’ as well as personal;
and the comprehensive protection of lord, estate, and servants gave the
medieval lordship its coherence and autonomy.^23
Pleas before the king
Legal rights were created by specific grants, and the procedures of royal
justice also began from charters granting land, immunity, and pro-
tection. Charters were essential instruments of rule for all the Germanic
kings. The Liber Iudicum, a law-book of the Visigoths in Spain which
was probably issued in 654, emphasized the force of written contracts
and deeds (pacta vel placita) and the iniquity of breaking or tampering
with them. There were special penalties for falsifying royal orders and
using them in court: it sounds as though litigants were regularly pro-
ducing forged summonses (falsa commonitoria) in the names of kings
or judges.^24 For the Franks, Marculf’s ‘royal charters’ include several
indicula—letters the function of which was to institute a legal hearing.
Thus no. 29 relates that a vassal has ‘entered the king’s presence’ and
‘suggested’ the unfair withholding of some right and his failure to
obtain justice from the withholder; ‘if this is so’ (si taliter agitur), the
defendant is ‘to make amends according to law’; and ‘if he will not and
has something to say on the other side’, he is to answer the complainant
in the king’s presence on a given day, ‘warned by this letter’ (per
hunc indecolum commoniti). The assumption that the procedure will
bring the parties to court is clear from the heading of no. 28 (Carta
audientiale), an order which is significantly not addressed to the defen-
dant or his lord but to the king’s official, the count of the pagus: in this
case land has been withheld ‘by force’, and the defendant is to be placed
under sureties to appear before the king on a certain day, if the matter
has not by then been settled ‘rightly’ before the count (ante vos recte
non finitur).^25
Heinrich Brunner noticed well over a century ago the resemblance of
the Frankish royal indiculato the writs of right described by ‘Glanvill’
in the late twelfth century, which stand at the beginning of the forms of
16 Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Justice
(^23) Formulae, 311 (no. 32), 323 (48).
(^24) Los Codigos españoles, 12 vols. (Madrid, 1847–51), i. 14, 53–4 (Lib. II, tit. v; Lib. VII,
tit. v).
(^25) Formulae, 59–61, 197 (nos. 27, 28); Die Gesetze der Langobarden, ed. F. Beyerle
(Weimar, 1947), 90 (224), 98 (243), 278 (115), 348 (8); P. Classen, ‘Kaiserreskript und
Königsurkunde’, part. ii, Archiv für Diplomatik, 2 (1956), 32 ff., 78–86.