Purchases and sales have traditionally been regarded as a form of transaction on a commercial market. However, the researchers within the land market project have established that this type of transaction was strongly impeded by personal bonds on account of pre-emptive rights of different kinds in different areas of Europe.This is also the case in my investigation regions,where it was, foremost, the family’s inheritance- and birth rights that limited the possibilities to act. During, above all, the course of the 1990s, many historians from Germany and England researched the medieval use of written documents. The results of the research on this practice indicate that the use of written documents in connection with land transactions increased when a region was sufficiently densely populated and many did business with each other. First and foremost, the use of the written document (instead of oral agreements) increased in relation to transactions where the parties were not related or when they exchanged something other than inherited land with a relative.The requirement and knowledge about who owned the land increased when one had no family knowledge as a starting point. In my investigation this is manifested in several ways. In Chapter Two, we saw that the legal acquisition inheritance was rarely represented in the material eg constantly, three per cent of the total available material in relation to all charters during the two centuries in Jämtland.The acquisition was also rarely represented in Finnveden ie 1½ per cent during the 14th Century and four per cent during the 15th Century.My interpretation of this is that the parties had control of the inheritance, and therefore only needed deviations from the prevailing rules of inheritance documented. The charters that are preserved differ in many instances from the applicable rules of inheritance; for example, there are charters where the daughter was able to inherit just as much as the son. p a r t v i 1 277 legal acqui s i t ion, l i te racy and the market economy
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