Close study of a surviving document cannot eliminate every problem in the wider record. A politically useful text might have been rewritten on period material, making its age alone a poor guarantee of authenticity. An inconvenient document might instead have been discarded, or the relevant qualification might have existed in a separate record that disappeared. Arguments from documentary silence therefore require care because alteration, replacement, and loss are distinct possibilities.
Notable Point · 23:24-24:23
Forgeries, rewritten records, and vanished documents
The succession problem becomes a warning about how difficult it can be to detect replacement, alteration, or loss in medieval records.