The dotal charter of this essay was a written deed (actum) whereby a man agreed to give a marriage gift, usually called a dowry (dos), to his betrothed. It was a northern successor to the Roman tabulae nuptiales discussed in the previous chapters, although the donor was the betrothed man and not the bride's father or parents. I shall consider the form and content of such charters in a Frankish tradition that ranged from the Merovingian period through the Carolingian period and continued into eleventh-century northern France.

One must assume that many such charters did not survive, and that what remains for us to examine is a small fraction. A dotal charter ceased to be relevant, at least in respect to the purpose for which it had been drawn up, when the dowered wife died. When a dotal charter or its content did survive, it was usually because someone put it to another use. In the early Middle Ages (roughly from the Merovingian period into the eleventh century), the content of some survived because a scribe made a revised copy to be used as a formula (i.e., a model or exemplar). Most of the dotal charters that have survived from the tenth and later centuries did so because a church or monastery retained them (usually as copies) in a cartulary, probably in view of some connection with the institution's own interests in the property.