Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

460 16. state, lordship and community in the west
world witnessed a considerable simplification in state machinery. In broad
terms, the state increasingly imposed less pressure on local societies to act
through the unit of the civitas, and, with the removal of this outside stimulus,
different collectivities could assume greater importance.
This was a far-reaching process, and no comprehensive survey of it can
be attempted here. The way it tended to work, however, can be approached
through an examination of powers of taxation. One important mechanism
leading to a general decline in the importance of taxation was the granting
of immunities. The effect of such grants is summarized in the Frankish
king Chlothar II’s praeceptio and edict of 614. This forbade royal agents to
demand payment of taxes and other public charges from the lands of
immunists. The formulary of Marculf goes into further detail:
no public agent may enter [the land of an immunist] to hear legal proceedings, to
take the peace-money [fredus], to procure lodgings or victuals, or to take sureties,
or, for one reason or another, to use force . . . or to demand payments . . . 72
Thus a grant of immunity removed a block of land from its existing administrative
unit – usually a civitas and its count – making the immunist directly
answerable to the king for his remaining obligations, such as military
service. Where such grants proliferated, civitas communities would obviously
fragment.
Immunities have long formed part of the ‘sacred rhetoric’ of early medieval
western historiography, and have been seen as central to the erosion
of Merovingian state power and the rise of the Carolingians. But immunists,
as a group, owed special allegiance to the king, and should perhaps
rather be seen as favoured royal supporters. Much more to the point for
present purposes is whether immunities were granted to lay as well as ecclesiastical
landowners in the Merovingian period. The sources show that in
principle they might be, but no specific example survives from the sixth or
seventh century. However, documents from this period survive only spasmodically,
and essentially via church archives, so the absence of lay immunists
from the documentary record is perhaps only to be expected.
Certainly, by late Merovingian times, many civitates had lost their cohesion.
The early-eighth-century correspondence of Boniface, for instance, seems
to reflect a world of small, administratively independent lordships.
Likewise, seventh-century kings restricted their rights to exercise a free
choice in appointing counts and bishops to civitates, agreeing to confine
their choice to local men. This development seems inconceivable if huge
amounts of territory, as in the sixth century, were still controlled from civitas
centres. Kings were probably willing to exercise less control over cities only
72 Form. Marc. 1.4, ed. A. Uddholm, Uppsala 1962, trans. James (1982) 62. The text refers to an ecclesiastical
immunist, but Chlothar’s edict refers to grants being made to both secular and ecclesiastical
potentes.
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