Is it possible to use the Llandaf charters to reveal significant changes in Welsh society? The most daring attempt to do so has been Wendy Davies's ‘intentionally speculative’ article in Past and Present in 1978. According to her hypothesis, changes in ‘the capacity of rulers to control the disposal of property in the late and post-Roman world remain fundamental to any understanding of the wider political and social change’. In the sixth and seventh centuries only kings could make land grants in south-east Wales. Then by the eighth century other members of royal dynasties, and non-royals, began to make grants, but, since ‘some royal action was at first essential to lay alienation’, two devices assisted them initially: either the king made the grant in association with the non-royal donor, described as the estate's ‘heir’ (heres or hereditarius, perhaps a royal tenant), or the king sold the estate to the non-royal so that he could donate it to the Church. There was a surge in such donations and therefore charters around the eighth century, and a subsequent, ‘possibly consequent’, change was that the estates granted became much smaller, sometimes being fragments of previous large estates, causing ‘considerable upheaval’. Lawlessness ‘becomes apparent in the material of the later ninth century’, raising the question: ‘Did the massive donation of lay properties in the eighth and ninth centuries effectively destroy the self-regulating mechanisms of … society and allow the development of social and political chaos, a chaos which occurred when the landed possessions of the kingship (which had no tradition of government anyway) were too depleted to allow for any alternative system?’ – A contrary trend, however, was that a ‘general royal capacity to exact taxation … appears to have developed by the ninth century’. If this was a real development (but see below), might one not expect it to enhance royal power and authority? In any case, how essential was king-centred government for the maintenance of law and order and the prevention of anarchy?

Although the numbers of relevant charters are small, it does seem that all the earliest plausible grants (some sixteen of them in Sequence i in LL, excluding two likely forgeries) are by kings.