Narrative sources for the study of later Merovingian history are sparse and notoriously difficult to use. The evidence provided by royal charters is therefore invaluable, although traditionally they have been studied as much for their form as for their content. Here, as always, the motive force behind the production, transmission and preservation of all kinds of charters was the conservation of property, and it is the establishment or description of the property ownership in the charter which illuminates the underlying human activity. When there is a formal dispute over property the recorded process of establishing ownership becomes far more complex and may reveal to us a vivid and detailed impression of contemporary activity. In the case of later Merovingian dispute settlement the very complexity of the records suggests that they may be most revealing. On the other hand, that complexity may lie in the form of the recording document rather than in the substance of the recorded dispute. This problem, the relationship of the formal record to the reality of dispute settlement, will be a continuing theme of the present paper.

Of the eighty-seven seventh- and early eighth-century Frankish documents printed in the Monumenta series, twenty-four are the formal records of disputes settled before the king. Such disputes, and hence the documents which record them, were known as placita, and a very high proportion of the placita, over two-thirds, have survived in their original form. All of them are concerned with property and in nearly all of the cases this means landed property.