A charter is testimony to the fact that someone wished to change something: in the charters, tenure is never seen in anything other than a state of flux. Likewise, cartularies present a snap-shot of the patrimony of an institution at a particular moment or moments in time. Particular kinds of observations may, therefore, be impossible.
2. A charter's form and content are dictated by the laws or norms of its area and may be irrelevant to actual events.Actual events may not be always reflected in charters, but deviation from formulae is frequent and continuous in all medieval charter corpora. Nor is the simple existence of a particular formula sufficient to explain its inclusion in a charter. Formulae and, indeed, formularies were only a resource to be drawn on, actively and creatively, by the redactor of a charter; they did not necessarily dictate the text of a document. Even in areas where it is close-to-certain which formularies were in use, it is not at all clear that they were used as source for 'live' texts rather than a training manual.
3. A charter's content was set by its transactor/by its redactor.The contents of a charter must at some level have been the product of negotiation between grantor, beneficiary, and redactor, but the specific input of each party is difficult to determine. Where bodies of charters by known scribes can be checked, preferences and habits are often detectable but almost always inconsistent. Sometimes this may be because the scribal names are themselves formulaic attributions to the head of an office or institution, as is clear from a number of cases from Sant Joan de Ripoll in Catalonia. At other times it may be because the transactors themselves had specific requirements; some studies, such as that by McKinley, suggest that transactors' circumstances can be reflected in charter texts, even though others wrote for them. Yet, given the language of the documents, were all transactors able to read or even understand the specific text of charters produced for them? Would every transactor have even seen the full written form of their charter? (see 4 below) Authorship of charters is never clear.
4. Charters were written in a single operation before/during/after the ceremony of benefaction.Charter-writing need not have been a single event: redaction rather frequently appears to have had several stages. A number of Anglo-Saxon charters show clear evidence of operative details, such as beneficiaries, witnesses, and boundary clauses, being added after the writing of the body of the text. Nor can it be assumed that all named witnesses or parties were ever together at a single meeting or ceremony. Jarrett has shown that one large Sant Joan de Ripoll document was written in several stages and that its initial list of those present and that of the actual witnesses seem to be separated perhaps by several months. The presence of witness signatures in identifiably different hands may be proof that some ceremonies of signing did take place but in cases where charters are known only from copies witness presence or even transactor presence can only be a presumption.
5. Charters are an official record of a transaction.Roman law required such records, but it is not clear if early medieval charters as they survive are these records. Variant copies of the same charter suggest that several different versions of events might have been recorded. Parallel work on capitularies and law-codes suggesting that many received texts are private copies drawn up from notes made at a gathering may be informative here; the same could clearly be true of charters. In any case, the uncertainty over the authorship of any given document must call into question any possible official status: official from whose perspective? Much recent work has stressed the idea that charters are narratives, preserving simply one view of events as they unfolded or, perhaps, as they should have unfolded.
6. The transactions recorded in charters took place.As records of dispute settlement make clear, the fact that a charter was made does not mean that all those in control of the properties or rights concerned acquiesced in their transfer or alteration. In some cases it can be demonstrated the transactions had to be repeated or affirmed, sometimes many years later and sometimes on several occasions; in other cases, documents that would have showed this may have been lost or discarded as unnecessary in the long term. A charter is a statement that something ought to have happened, but in some cases it may well not have done so.
7. Preserved documents are representative.Every stage of preservation implies a charter's continuing utility; documents whose long-term utility was limited tend to be selected against. Investment in copying or preserving a document can only have been justified if that document continued to serve some contemporary purpose, a purpose that need not have been identical with that of its original production. Meanwhile, external factors like war, accident, fire, water, Vikings or mice must have faulted even such strategies of preservation in many cases. Arguments resting on the non-existence of charters therefore have extremely shaky foundations.