THE IMPORTANCE OF CHARTER EVIDENCE

A crucial body of evidence for demonstrating the use of writing in legal transactions is the charter material, since legal transactions involving property, whether moveable or immoveable, were recorded in writing throughout the early middle ages. Charters are single-sheet documents recording gifts or sales of land or moveable property, the manumission of slaves, the grant of land in precaria (in which the donor would usually retain the use of the land in exchange for a rent or services during his lifetime) or exchanges of property. Nearly all the surviving charters from the early middle ages on the Continent are either royal diplomas or charters relating to a particular institution, most usually a monastery or cathedral church. There is thus a heavy ecclesiastical bias in the sources, but allowance should be made for the circumstances of the survival of documents: institutions are more likely to be successful in preserving their archives than private individuals, but we cannot assume that only the church was concerned in legal transactions involving writing. The number of private gifts to the church, and the occasional documents concerning wholly lay transactions of land which have survived, make it possible to treat the charter evidence as pertaining to legal transactions generally.