History is the debtor of many intellectual disciplines, but is often thereby enslaved. Archaeology, philology and sociology can be ruthless creditors. Many forms of a ‘pure’ historian's written evidence demand inside knowledge of their genre, from Egyptian papyri to Fleet Street tabloids. Understanding our means of perceiving the past risks becoming an end in itself. This is especially so in Europe's early middle ages: ‘Dark Ages’, not just because they were ‘barbarous’, nor even because shortage of documentary guides makes them relatively impenetrable, but because the waywardness of literacy in so much of the area for so much of the era raises particularly awkward questions about the motivation and audience of what texts we have, narrative or documentary. This book seeks to emancipate the historical perspective on two aspects of the evidence for the period where means have tended to be ends: the charter and the law.

Early medieval historians lack the sort of bureaucratic records which are staple fare for students of politics, government and law in later ages. More or less formal documents were produced, sometimes in very large numbers. But no known text before Domesday Book (1086) survives today because it was kept by the secular government responsible for producing it. Until then – and in most of Europe for some time later – our archival repositories were churches. However apparently vulnerable themselves, only ecclesiastical corporations had a sufficiently continuous tradition to pass their records on to modern times.