There was an enormous increase in both the quality and the quantity of legal and administrative documentation in the Carolingian period. How is one to account for this? It is due partly to the strands of continuity maintained from the Roman and through the Merovingian periods. In the political development of the Frankish kingdoms from the fifth century, a striking feature is the integration of writing into the legal process. It is the most obvious inheritance from the Roman past. Thus the written word was accommodated within Frankish society not only through the influence of the Christian church and its promotion of a ‘religion of the book’, but also through the secular law and administration. If it be correct to understand Frankish society before the late fifth century as pre-literate, the process of expansion, political assertion and social integration in sub-Roman and Merovingian Gaul meant that legal norms gradually ceased to reside in the memory of each man in the community, but instead were recorded in writing and preserved, and thus given a new character. This is evident in the legacy of the Roman imperial and the sub-Roman legal tradition to the successor kingdoms of western Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries, in the survival of elements of Roman or sub-Roman law in the barbarian leges and in the continuing knowledge of Roman law.