ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an argument that, during the period between the twelfth century and the fourteenth, the idea of privilege played a central role in social organisation and in the ways in which law was perceived. Particular privileges contributed to the establishment in medieval societies of the idea and practice of a generally applicable law. The study of medieval privileges is thus part of the intellectual history of the construction of norms, at a crucial moment when two institutions, the papal Church and monarchic State, both sought to monopolise control of what the norm was. In common parlance, privilege seems the opposite of law: whether attached to individuals or groups, it represents an exception resulting from an arbitrary decision, new or inherited. A privilege, demonstrating as it did the ruler's omnipotence and beneficence, and thanks to its lofty origin, came to constitute the noblest sort of right, alongside the imperial rescript or command.
