We begin with the issue of property and betrothal. It is a truism that Roman law was concerned not with marriage, but with the ancestral, property and financial consequences of marriage. It is clear that the same can be said for the post-Imperial law codes. This issue has been at the heart of a majority of discussion of post-Imperial families, and has coloured these discussions, to the extent that other aspects of betrothal and the creation of new households have been marginalised. Property negotiations appear only in the post-Imperial legal texts. In the same way, they are issues confined to the legal sphere in the classical Roman world. In all of the codes, and in stark contrast to betrothal in late Roman law, it is the bride and her family who appear to be the primary recipients of property. Equally different is the apparent movement of the bride into the groom's family network at the point of marriage. It is these two features of post-Imperial, non-Roman betrothal which mark it as different in nature to betrothal conducted according to Roman Imperial law. Nonetheless, there are similarities in the way that these betrothal negotiations are undertaken between the post-Imperial and late Roman law, particularly with regard to the legal and contractual processes of betrothal. In particular, the emphasis on clear negotiations on property transfers, a betrothal ceremony, the use of the term sponsus/a (‘betrothed man/woman’) to denote a betrothed person, and the regulation of a two-year time limit between betrothal and marriage are very much the same as betrothal in the Roman world and presented in a profoundly Romanised fashion.

The presentation of property exchange at betrothal in the legal codes, however, has obscured these similarities. These laws describe a picture of a complex exchange of property between the families of the bride and groom, and the couple themselves, of which the most striking element for many scholars has been the clear shift from Roman dowries, to post-Imperial dotes, morgengabe, metae, pretii and wittimon as new and different forms of marital property transfer.