The Frankish monarch had also the power of making laws, which he exercised after consulting the chief men of the kingdom, both lay and ecclesiastical, in the _placita_, which were meetings differing from the _Campus Martius_ and apparently modelled principally on the councils of the Church. But throughout the kingdom in many places the direct authority of the king over the people ceased to make itself felt. The _immunitates_, granted chiefly to the great ecclesiastical properties, limited this authority in a curious way by forbidding public officials to exercise their functions in the precinct of land which was _immunis_. The judicial and fiscal rights frequently passed to the landowner, who in any case became of necessity the intermediary between the supreme power and the people. In regard to this last point, moreover, the case seems to have been the same with all the great landowners or _potentes_, whose territory was called _potestas_, and who gained a real authority over those living within it; later in the middle ages they were called _homines potestatis_ (_hommes de poeste_).
Other principles, arising perhaps less from Germanic custom strictly speaking than from an inferior level of civilization, also contributed towards the weakening of the royal power. The monarch, like his contemporaries, considered the kingdom and the rights of the king over it to be his property; consequently, he had the power of dealing with it as if it were a private possession; it is this which gave rise to the concessions of royal rights to individuals, and later to the partitions of the kingdom, and then of the empire, between the sons of the king or emperor, to the exclusion of the daughters, as in the division of an inheritance in land. This proved one of the chief weaknesses of the Merovingian monarchy.
In order to rule the Gallo-Romans, the barbarians had had inevitably to ask the help of the Church, which was the representative of Roman civilization. Further, the Merovingian monarch and the Catholic Church had come into close alliance in their struggle with the Arians. The result for the Church had been that she gained new privileges, but at the same time became to a certain extent dependent. Under the Merovingians the election of the bishop _a clero et populo_ is only valid if it obtains the assent (_assensus_) of the king, who often directly nominates the prelate. But at the same time the Church retains her full right of acquiring property, and has her jurisdiction partially recognized; that is to say, she not only exercises more freely than ever a disciplinary jurisdiction, but the bishop, in place of the civil power, administers civil and criminal justice over the clergy. The councils had for a long time forbidden the clergy to cite one another before secular tribunals; they had also, in the 6th century, forbidden secular judges under pain of excommunication to cite before them and judge the clergy, without permission of the bishop. A decree of Clotaire II. (614) acknowledged the validity of these claims, but not completely; a precise interpretation of the text is, however, difficult.