High, middle and low justice

It was held by many lesser authorities, including many lords of the manor, who sat in justice over the serfs, unfree tenants, and freeholders on their land.

In fact, feudal justice was a labyrinth of specific customs and rules in nearly endless variation, not governed by any clear legal logic, and subject to significant historical evolution in time.

In judicial matters—as in all spheres of life—feudal society did not see uniformity as either possible or necessarily desirable, each town and region has its customs and ways of doing things, and resented attempts to interfere with them.

Some feudal houses adopted a red field symbolic of the blood banner into their coat of arms, the so-called Regalienfeld.

Thus permanent gallows are often erected in prominent public places; the very word for them in French, potence, is derived from the Latin "potentia" meaning "power".

Other such privileges could include a seat in a diet or a similar feudal representative assembly, before the third estate as such even aspired to such "parliamentary" representation, or the right to mint coins.

These privileges indicating its so-called liberty was an "equal" enclave in the territorial jurisdiction of the neighboring feudal (temporal or ecclesiastical) Lord, sometimes even extending rather like a polis in Antiquity.