ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is composed of extracts from legal texts that relate to sexual behaviour or to marriage issued by secular jurisdictions. It is interested in the regulation of sex and marriage for spiritual and moral reasons, then, the major focus of the texts here is property and money. The book consists of legal texts from early medieval England, from Ethelbert of Kent in the seventh century to Canute in the eleventh. It contains early medieval legal texts from the Lombard kingdom, from Ireland, and from the kingdom of the Franks. The book contains legal material produced after the eleventh-century Norman conquest of England.
