Nine years ago, we completed the predecessor to this volume, The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe. The present book is the work of substantially the same group of people, and it starts from the same two premisses: first, that the early medieval period has to be understood in its own terms, not in those of the better documented periods before and after it, the late Roman Empire and the ‘high’ middle ages of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; second, that its political and social structures are best appreciated, not through the study of laws and other normative texts, but through charters.

Although charters evidently relate to the world of written law, they are much closer than are laws to the daily practices of the men and women of the early middle ages. Indeed, they are as close as we can normally get to such practices, at least in so far as the latter involve the possession of land. In our previous book, we looked at the records of court cases and other disputes, as a guide to these practices at the point where they came closest to the world of law. In this one, we look at the relationship between landed property and political power. This is a huge topic; it cannot be encompassed in a single work, and we have not tried to. In addition, we are all nine years older and nine years busier; we have thought it best not to try to weld our work into a single line of argument, as was our intention in The Settlement of Disputes.