According to the provisions of maritime law and the law of war, the legality of a ship capture was established in court by proving that the ship or its cargo belonged to a declared enemy. In the case of French-flagged ships captured during the War of the Austrian Succession, many cases were resolved relatively quickly. As enemy ships, they were “condemned as prize” by the British High Court of Admiralty. The goods and the ships were put to auction. The surviving documents of these court cases are therefore mostly limited to the court records (CP) and the original ship's papers (SP) or abstracts and translations of the ship’s papers that were used as evidence in court.