With few exceptions, these houses were those whose heads held a seat in the Imperial Diet when mediatised during the establishment of the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806–07, by France in 1810, or by the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15.
Whilst they lost sovereignty and certain rights (such as legislation, taxation, appellate jurisdiction, and control over policing and conscription) in their territories, they often still retained their private estates and some feudal rights, which may have included exclusive or primary access to local forestry, fishing, mining or hunting resources, jurisdiction over policing and lower level civil and criminal court cases.
Mediatised houses also possessed the right to settle anywhere within the German Confederation while retaining their territorial prerogatives.
From 1836 the Almanach de Gotha listed the mediatised houses in a section of their own, separate from both ruling dynasties and from princely and ducal families which were not recognized as having exercised sovereignty since the Congress of Vienna.
The rights of the mediatised houses in Austria and Czechoslovakia were abolished in 1919 following the defeat of Austria-Hungary in World War I and the establishment of republics in those countries.