The Village World of Early Medieval Northern Spain: Local Community and the Land Market

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THE VILLAGE WORLD OF EARLY MEDIEVAL NORTHERN SPAIN

In the early eighth century, the Muslim general Tariq ibn Ziyad led his forces across the Straits of Gibraltar and conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula. However, alongside the flourishing kingdom of al-Andalus, the small Christian realm of Asturias-León endured in the northern mountains. This book charts the social, economic and political development of Asturias-León from the Islamic conquest to 1031. Using a forensic comparative method, which examines the abundant charter material from two regions of northern Spain – the Liébana valley in Cantabria, and the Celanova region of southern Galicia – it sheds new light on village society, the workings of government, and the constant swirl of buying, selling and donating that marked the rhythms of daily life. It also maps the contact points between rulers and ruled, offering new insights on the motivations and actions of both peasant proprietors and aristocrats.

THE VILLAGE WORLD OF EARLY MEDIEVAL NORTHERN SPAIN LOCAL COMMUNITY AND THE LAND MARKET

ROBERT PORTASS is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University Front cover: ‘September’, from a series of murals depicting an agricultural calendar, Pantheon of the Kings of León, Basilica de San Isidoro de León. Photo: Fernando Ruiz Tomé. © Museo de San Isidoro de León.

ROYAL  HISTORICAL  SOCIETY

STUDIES IN HISTORY

Robert Portass

of Lincoln.

An imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620–2731 (US)

Robert Portass STUDIES IN HISTORY

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ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY STUDIES IN HISTORY New Series

THE VILLAGE WORLD OF EARLY MEDIEVAL NORTHERN SPAIN

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Studies in History New Series Editorial Board Professor Vanessa Harding (Convenor) Dr D’Maris Coffman Professor Peter Coss (Past and Present Society) Professor Emma Griffin (Literary Director) Dr Rachel Hammersley Professor Michael Hughes (Honorary Treasurer) Professor Daniel Power Professor Guy Rowlands Professor Alec Ryrie

This series is supported by annual subventions from the Economic History Society and from the Past and Present Society

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THE VILLAGE WORLD OF EARLY MEDIEVAL NORTHERN SPAIN LOCAL COMMUNITY AND THE LAND MARKET

Robert Portass

THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY THE BOYDELL PRESS

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© Robert Portass 2017 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Robert Portass to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2017 A Royal Historical Society publication Published by The Boydell Press an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN 978-0-86193-344-0 ISSN 0269-2244

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate

This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

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Contents List of illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements viii Abbreviations x Note on names, place names and spellings Introduction: The making of medieval Iberia, 711–1031

xiii 1

PART I: THE LIÉBANA

27

1 Cantabria after Rome

29

2 Local society in the ninth century

49

3 The emergence of a village elite

66

4 Kings, counts and courts

97

PART II: SOUTHERN GALICIA

115

5 Galicia after Rome

117

6 Before Celanova

133

7 Rosendo, Celanova and the village world, 936–1031

153

8 Magnates, monasteries and the public framework

174

Conclusion 194 Bibliography 200 Index 219

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Illustrations

Figures 1. The kings of Asturias

7

2. The kings of León

8

3. Major families in the Liébana in the tenth century 4. The family of Rosendo

68 156

Maps 1. North-western Iberia

5

2. The political geography of the Iberian Peninsula, c. 950

10

3. The Liébana valley

36

4. Major settlements in the Liébana valley

81

5. Celanova

132

6. Places named in the Colmellum divisionis of 934

179

Table 1. The transactions of Bagaudano and Faquilona

88

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Acknowledgements This book, for its author at least, has been a long time coming. Its origins can be traced to two years spent in Santiago de Compostela, where my interest in the history of Spain first took root. Yet the Spain I encountered a decade ago was not a Spain that my preconceptions had prepared me for. Life in Compostela, largely spent negotiating the regional language and the incessant rain, taught me above all that the Romans were right to talk of the Hispaniae: not one Spain, but many – and all the better for it. This book owes its creation to the quite astounding richness and variety of a country I have come to think of as a second home, and to all of the friends, scholars, librarians and archivists who have assisted me in my academic enterprises there over the last decade. Many people have helped me to bring this book to publication. I remain grateful to them all, but it would be remiss of me not to mention the following individuals. Chris Wickham’s expertise and advice have been a source of great inspiration, as have his encouragement and kindness. Likewise, Wendy Davies has assisted me greatly, supplying references here and discussing recondite material there, all with the object of adding to my understanding. My work has benefitted hugely from the frank and tremendously well-informed criticisms of both. Also deserving of particular mention are Jeremy Catto, whose guidance, friendship and belief in my work over many years continue to inspire me; Graham Barrett, in whom I have found the soundest of allies in the field of Iberian Studies and a truly insightful thinker on all things Spanish and medieval; and Simon Barton, who in recent decades has done as much as anyone in the Anglophone world to mine the rich seams of Spanish historical enquiry. Across Spain, many historians have been magnanimous with their time and advice. Santiago Castellanos García showed enough faith in my work to invite me to join a research project while I was still an Early Career Fellow. Iñaki Martín Viso, Eduardo Manzano Moreno, Julio Escalona Monge, Isaac Sastre de Diego, Igor Santos Salazar, José Miguel Andrade Cernadas, José Carlos Sánchez Pardo and Ermelindo Portela Silva have all at various times provided welcome encouragement as well as reams of secondary literature. José Carlos also provided crucial assistance with the maps, as did Cath D’Alton, who drew the final versions that appear in this book. Since September 2014 colleagues at the University of Lincoln have offered kindly assistance at every turn, and the writing of this book was completed in that amenable environment. Most of the book, however, was written in Oxford, and in Pontevedra, Spain. I have been fortunate to receive assistance from many institutions without which it could not have been written. The University of Lincoln Research Resources Fund, the Faculty of History at Oxford, the Peter Storey Scholarship (Balliol College), the John Fell Fund viii

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Acknowledgements

(OUP), the Anglo-Spanish Society (now the British-Spanish Society), the Leverhulme Trust, the Instituto de Estudos Medievais in Lisbon, the Economic History Society, and the Universidad de León, all awarded funding and/ or institutional affiliations from which I have benefitted hugely. Crucially, a Santander Universities Mobility Scholarship made it possible for me to consult some of the archival material analysed in this book in Spain. Staff at the Bodleian Library and the Sackler Library in Oxford assisted me cheerfully during my long periods of library hibernation. Graham Barrett, Jeremy Catto, Wendy Davies, Matthew Innes, George Molyneaux, José Carlos Sánchez Pardo, Edward White and Chris Wickham have all helped in various crucial ways, by reading, proof-reading, or discussing aspects of this book with me. I also thank Daniel Power, Christine Linehan and the Royal Historical Society’s Studies in History board, as well as Boydell & Brewer, who have helped me to produce this book. Finally, the Museo San Isidoro de León deserves thanks for granting me permission to use the image that appears on the front cover. None of the individuals or institutions named above bear any responsibility for the book’s errors or infelicities. I have been touched but not surprised by the warmth and understanding shown to me by my family during my academic career thus far, both here in the UK and in Spain. While they have always supported my work, it has been a useful corrective at moments in which my sense of perspective was failing me, to see that sales of land made by ninth-century peasants, or the theoretical underpinnings of the medieval land market, are not the be all and end all for everyone. This book is dedicated to my parents, and to Pili, to whom I owe my happiness. It is also written in memory of two great family patriarchs, Albert and Luis, who are much missed but would, I think, have been pleased to see this book in their hands. Sadly, as this book was going to press, a family matriarch joined Albert and Luis: this is for her also. Robert Portass November 2016

ix

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Abbreviations AHDS AHN AHUS CAIII

CI HC HG Hydatius IBC LV MGH   AA   Leges   SRG   SRM PMH, Sc. VR

VSE

VSF

Archivo Histórico Diocesano de Santiago de Compostela Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid Arquivo Histórico Universitario de Santiago de Compostela Chronica Adefonsi tertii regis, ed. J. Gil Fernández, J. L. Moralejo and J. I. Ruiz de la Peña, Crónicas asturianas: Crónica de Alfonso III (Rotense y ‘a Sebastián’) y Crónica albeldense (y ‘profética’), Oviedo 1985 Rot. = Rotensis; Seb. = Ad Sebastianum; Alb. = Chronica Albeldensia Chronicon Iriense, in El Cronicón Iriense, estudio preliminar, edición crítica, y notas históricas, ed. M. R. García Álvarez, Madrid 1963 Historia Compostellana, cura et studio, ed. E. Falque Rey, Turnhout 1988 Isidore of Seville, Historia Gothorum, Vandalorum, Sueborum, ed. T. Mommsen, MGH, AA xi, Berlin 1894, 241–303 Hydatius, Chronica, in The Chronicle of Hydatius and the Consularia Constantinopolitana, ed. R. W. Burgess, Oxford 1993 John of Biclar, Iohannis abbatis Biclarensis Chronica, ed. T. Mommsen, MGH, AA xi, Berlin 1894, 207–20 Leges Visigothorum, ed. K. Zeumer, MGH, Leges, i, Hanover 1902 Monumenta Germaniae Historica Auctores Antiquissimi Leges Nationum Germanicarum Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum Portugaliae Monumenta Historica a saeculo octavo post Christum usque ad quintum decimum: scriptores, ed. A. Herculano de Carvalho e Araujo and J. J. da Silva Mendes Leal, Lisbon 1856 Ordoño de Celanova, Vita Rudesindi, ed. M. C. Díaz y Díaz, M. V. Pardo Gómez and D. Vilariño Pintos, Ordoño de Celanova, Vida y Milagros de San Rosendo, edición, traducción y estudio por M. C. Díaz y Díaz, M. V. Pardo Gómez, D. Vilariño Pintos; con un apéndice anatomo-antropológico por J. Carro Otero, La Coruña 1990 Braulio of Zaragoza, Vita S. Emiliani, ed. I. Cazzaniga, ‘La vita di S. Emiliano, scritta da Braulione vescovo di Saragozza’, in Bolletino del comitato per la preparazione delle edizioni nazionali dei classici greci e latini, Rome 1955, 7–44 Vita S. Fructuosi, ed. M. C. Díaz y Díaz, in La vida de San Fructuoso de Braga, estudio y edición crítica, Braga 1974, 75–117 x

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Abbreviations

Journals AEM AHDE AM CHE EHR EME Est. Mind. Hispania JMH NC P&P SHHM TRHS TSP

Anuario de Estudios Medievales Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español Archeologia Medievale Cuadernos de Historia de España English Historical Review Early Medieval Europe Estudios Mindonienses: Anuario de estudios histórico-teológicos de la diócesis de Mondoñedo-Ferrol Hispania: Revista Española de Historia Journal of Medieval History Nivel Cero Past and Present Studia Historica: Historia Medieval Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Territorio, Sociedad y Poder: Revista de Estudios Medievales

Charter Editions CDAG Colección diplomática altomedieval de Galicia, I: Documentación editada en escritura visigótica (662–1234), ed. A. Castro Correa, Noia 2011 Charters cited as CDAG1, CDAG2, etc. CDC Colección diplomática del monasterio de Celanova (842–1230), I: (842–942); II: (943–988); III: (989–1006), ed. E. Sáez and C. Sáez, Alcalá de Henares 1996, 2000, 2006 Charters cited as Cel1, Cel2, etc. Floriano Diplomática española del período astur: estudio de las fuentes documentales del reino de Asturias (718–910), ed. A. C. Floriano Cumbreño, Oviedo 1949–51 Charters cited as Flo1, Flo2, etc. La Coruña La Coruña: fondo antiguo, ed. C. Sáez and M. del Val González de la Peña, Alcalá de Henares 2003–4 Charters cited as LC1, LC2, etc. Ourense Documentos da Catedral de Ourense, ed. E. Duro Peña, La Coruña 1996 Charters cited as DCO1, DCO2, etc. Piasca Colección diplomática de Santa María de Piasca (857–1252), ed. J. Montenegro Valentín, Santander 1991 Charters cited as P1, P2, etc. PMH Portugaliae Monumenta Historica a saeculo octavo post Christum usque ad quintum decimum: diplomata et chartae, i–ii, ed. A. Herculano de Carvalho e Araujo and J. J. da Silva Mendes Leal, Lisbon 1868–9 Charters cited as PMH1, PMH2, etc. xi

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Colección diplomática del monasterio de Sahagún (siglos IX y X), ed. J. M. Mínguez Fernández, León 1976 Charters cited as Sahagún1, Sahagún2, etc. Santo Toribio Cartulario de Santo Toribio de Liébana: edición y estudio, ed. L. Sánchez Belda, Madrid 1948 Charters cited as T1, T2, etc. Sobrado Tumbos del monasterio de Sobrado de los Monjes, ed. P. Loscertales de García de Valdeavellano, Madrid 1976 Charters cited as Sob1, Sob2, etc. Tombo O Tombo de Celanova: estudio introductorio, edición e índices (ss. IX– XII), ed. J. M. Andrade Cernadas, Santiago de Compostela 1995 Charters cited at TdeC1, TdeC2, etc. Tumbo A La documentación del Tumbo A de la Catedral de Santiago de Compostela: estudio y edición, ed. M. Lucas Álvarez, León 1997 Charters cited as SdeC1, SdeC2, etc.

Sahagún

xii

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Introduction: The Making of Medieval Iberia, 711–1031 ‘Who can relate such perils? Who can enumerate such grievous disasters?’1

This is a book about the development of social relations and politics in Christian northern Spain in the three centuries after Iberia was radically transfigured by the Muslim invasion of the early eighth century. These events mark a historical and historiographical caesura of unusual clarity, for in the summer of 711, Arab-Berber armies under the command of Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, destroyed the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo, and set in place the foundations of Islamic Iberia, better known to posterity as al-Andalus.2 Famously, for the anonymous writer of the Latin Chronicle of 754, one of the few more or less contemporary sources, the scale of ‘such grievous disasters’ was hard to accept: Spain, ‘once so delightful and now rendered so miserable’, had fallen into ruin and disgrace of the most ignominious kind.3 Yet this colourful description of the fall of the regnum Visigothorum is little more than a literary set-piece, and if we look beyond the predictable alarm expressed by the Christian writer of this crucial early text and draw upon insights provided by a wide range of later sources, it becomes clear that the Arab-Berber advance moved through the peninsula with surprising ease, after an initial, seemingly decisive, victory had been achieved near Medina Sidonia.4 Surviving ‘The Chronicle of 754’, ed. and trans. K. B. Wolf, in Conquerors and chroniclers of early medieval Spain, Liverpool 1990, 111–60 at p. 133. For a recent edition of the Latin text, alongside a Spanish translation, see Continuatio Isidoriana Hispana: crónica mozárabe de 754, ed. J. E. López Pereira, León 2009. 2 For an introduction to the Arab conquest and settlement see R. Collins, The Arab conquest of Spain, 710–797, Oxford 1989, ch. ii and pp. 151–68; V. Salvatierra and A. Canto, al-Ándalus: de la invasión al Califato de Córdoba, Madrid 2008; and E. Manzano Moreno, Conquistadores, emires y califas: los Omeyas y la formación de al-Andalus, Barcelona 2006, and ‘La conquista del 711: transformaciones y pervivencias’, in L. Caballero Zoreda and P. Mateos Cruz (eds), Visigodos y omeyas: un debate entre la antigüedad tardía y la alta edad media, Madrid 2000, 401–14. Coinage demonstrates that, early into its existence, Arab authorities called their newly conquered territory ‘al-Andalus’: A. Canto, ‘Las monedas y la conquista’, in E. Baquedano (ed.), 711: arqueología e historia entre dos mundos, Alcalá de Henares 2011, 135–43. 3 For the chronicle’s description of Spain’s fate see Wolf, Conquerors and chroniclers, 25–42 at p. 133. On the text see C. Cardelle de Hartman, ‘The textual transmission of the Mozarabic Chronicle of 754’, EME viii (1999), 13–29. 4 A summary in provided in Salvatierra and Canto, De la invasión, ch. ii; cf. H. Kennedy, ‘The Muslims in Europe’, in R. McKitterick (ed.), The new Cambridge medieval 1

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accounts suggest that a combination of military superiority and negotiated settlement with prominent local powerbrokers – such as the Visigothic count, Theodomir – ensured that most of the peninsula was under nominal Muslim control as early as 720.5 The imposition of taxation soon followed, and Toledo lost its political centrality over the course of the next few years.6 Conquest and consolidation, certainly in the southern half of the peninsula, proved to be a relatively straightforward affair. In contrast, it is not clear that the Arabs held long-term designs on either the northern reaches of the dry central plateau known as the Meseta, or the area to the north of the Cantabrian chain, a range of limestone mountains that carves its way across northern Spain; indeed, after a major Berber revolt in the 740s, the Arabs seem to have all but abandoned the vast region from the Basque Country to Galicia, having previously established garrisons at sites such as Lugo and Gijón. Quite why the northern littoral was abandoned remains a contentious issue.7 Most likely, the challenges presented by poor communications and inclement conditions persuaded the Arab authorities of the wisdom of withdrawal from the northern fringe of the peninsula. Whatever the case may be, this stratagem scarcely hindered the creation of a powerful Islamic state in the south, based in the fertile valley of the Guadalquivir at Córdoba from the second decade of the eighth century. This region had been the cornerstone of Roman Spain, and the Arabs rapidly restored it to pre-eminence: within a generation of the conquest, coinage, taxation and a complicated court politics buttressed an ambitious, expanding state; in ninth-century western Europe, only the Carolingian empire matched the Umayyad dynasty of al-Andalus in terms of power, resources and prestige; by the middle of the tenth century, Córdoba had acquired such wealth and renown that the Saxon nun Hrotsvitha described the city as the ‘ornament of the world’.8 And yet, after 1031, the Iberian world brought into being with the ruination of the Visigothic kingdom history, II: c. 700–c. 900, Cambridge 1995, 249–71 at pp. 255–8. There is an excellent recent analysis of the source material in N. Clarke, The Muslim conquest of Iberia, Abingdon 2012. 5 Surviving in the Arab historiographical tradition is Theodomir’s pact with ‘Abd al–Aziz, the first governor of al-Andalus, in which the continued authority and religious freedom of this Visigothic noble of the Murcia region were officially conceded on the condition that he recognise his submission and agree to certain fiscal exactions: see further Collins, Arab conquest, 39–43. I have used Olivia Remie Constable’s translation in her Medieval Iberia: readings from Christian, Muslim and Jewish sources, 2nd edn, Philadelphia 2012, 45–6. This was itself based upon al-Dabbī, Kitāb bughyāt al-multamis fī ta’rīkh rijāl ahl al-Andalus, ed. F. Codera and J. Ribera, Madrid 1885. 6 Collins, Arab conquest, 40–2; P. Chalmeta, Invasión e islamización: la sumisión de Hispania y la formación de al-Andalus, Madrid 1994. 7 Collins, Arab conquest, 49; E. Manzano Moreno, ‘Las fuentes árabes sobre la conquista de al-Andalus: una nueva interpretación’, Hispania lix (1999), 389–432. 8 ‘Partibus occiduis fulsit clarum decus orbis … Corduba famoso locuples de nomine dicta’: Hrotsvitae opera, ed. P. von Winterfeld, MGH, SRG xxxiv, i/iv, at p. 52.

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Introduction

was transformed anew, as a resurgent group of northern Christian kingdoms, capitalising on internal disarray in the Caliphate, unwittingly redrew the political geography of medieval Iberia once again. There are, then, good reasons to choose 711 and 1031 as the starting and terminal points of this book: both dates heralded genuinely momentous political change in the Iberian Peninsula. In recent years, scholarship on this period has shed a great deal of light on the functioning and development of the Umayyad Emirate (756–929) and Caliphate (929–1031) in Spain, and attempts have been made to place the ‘ornament of the world’ in comparative Eurasian perspective.9 But what can be said about those Iberian peoples whose lives took an altogether different trajectory in the early Middle Ages? This book tells the tale of how Christian societies in two regions of the north-west of the peninsula developed from the demise of the Visigothic Kingdom in 711 to the dissolution of the Umayyad Caliphate in 1031. Its focus is socio-economic and political, and it is overwhelmingly centred on the development of rural society and the social and political relations that framed the village world, because these factors were the basis for all political power in the period. In addition, although afforded less attention here, this book discusses the effects of the complex relationships between regional power players and the rulers of the emergent kingdoms of Asturias (c.718–910) and León (910–1037).10 These relationships influenced the dynamics of local society and the shape that these kingdoms came to take. Evidential imbalances necessarily take their toll: the relative abundance of evidence from the later end of this period means that the eighth century receives much less attention than the ninth and tenth centuries. Nevertheless, if Spanish developments are to be placed in context, some sense of longer-term change is necessary, and this means grappling with ideas that frame the study of the period more widely. Elsewhere, this has meant thinking about the applicability of the concept of ‘Feudal Revolution’, a model which has exerted a great deal of influence on Spanish scholarship. This model identifies above all two crucial phenomena: first, the breakdown of effective royal authority in the late tenth century, and the subsequent desuetude of its institutional apparatus; and second, the creation of localised lordships built upon the ever greater exploitation of a peasantry no longer protected by public structures of redress.11

C. Wickham, The inheritance of Rome: a history of Europe from 400 to 1000, London 2009, 338–47. The Umayyad Emirate became the Caliphate of Córdoba when ‘Abd al–Rahman iii took the title of caliph in 929; its dissolution in 1031 led to the emergence of smaller, so-called taifa kingdoms: Salvatierra and Canto, De la invasión, chs viii, ix. 10 The small north-eastern kingdom of Pamplona, of obscure ninth–century origins, is not treated here. For more information see J. J. Larrea, La Navarre du IVe au XIIe siècle: peuplement et société, Brussels 1998. 11 Here the bibliography is too vast to cite in detail, but the key texts remain G. Duby, La Société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnais, Paris 1953, and P. Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du Xe à la fin du XIe siècle: croissance et mutations d’une société, Toulouse 9

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Yet neither of these two notions offers a satisfactory explanation of northern Spanish development in this period. This study aims to explore new lines of inquiry, and by so doing to shed new light on ‘the contact points between high politics and local affairs’ in early medieval north-western Spain.12 It seeks to integrate the study of peasant societies with analyses of royal and aristocratic power, for only by reframing the subject in this way do we come to appreciate the diversity of experience that characterised peasant and aristocratic life in the two regional case studies analysed here, southern Galicia and the Liébana. The recognition of regional difference, drawn into sharper focus by means of comparative analysis, allows us to assess the continuing usefulness of the standard depictions of Spanish social and political history in the Christian realms of northern Iberia in this period. These depictions frequently fail to account for developments that diverge in interesting and crucial ways from those seen in other parts of the medieval West, with Spain itself still too often seen in the Anglophone world as Auden’s ‘arid square … soldered so crudely to inventive Europe’.13 But it was more than that: it has its own story to tell, offering interesting parallels with, and equally significant divergences from, wider European developments. This book looks to illuminate society and politics in this often neglected part of the continent, thereby enhancing our understanding of broader processes of social and political change in the early Middle Ages. The Christian kingdoms of Asturias-León ‘Omnemque Gotorum ordinem, sicuti Toleto fuerat, tam in eclesia quam palatio in Ouetao cuncta statuit’14

For the historians of the Asturian court who first chronicled the dramatic changes of the eighth century, Toledo was a powerful emblem of times past. But a sense of continuity, as well as change, inspired those historians, and one of the most arresting statements in the late ninth-century Chronicon Albeldensis claims that the ‘entire order of the Goths, just as it was in Toledo’ was restored in Oviedo, capital of the Kingdom of Asturias from about 800.15 Whether this programme of restoration ever amounted to more than the construction of ceremonial buildings (such as the ‘eclesia’ and ‘palatium’ mentioned by the 1975. For a comprehensive recent discussion see C. West, Reframing the feudal revolution: political and social transformation between Marne and Moselle, c. 800–c.1100, Cambridge 2013. 12 The phrase used here is Hans Hummer’s in Politics and power in early medieval Europe: Alsace and the Frankish realm, 600–1000, Cambridge 2005, 4. 13 From ‘Spain, 1937’, in W. H. Auden, Another time, 2nd edn, London 2007, 93–6. 14 CAIII, Alb., xv, 9. 15 On the Albeldensis see A. Isla Frez, ‘Identidades y goticismo en época de Alfonso iii: las propuestas de la Albeldense’, TSP vi (2011), 11–21.

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Map 1.  North-western Iberia. This content downloaded from 130.56.64.29 on Sat, 20 Jan 2018 02:00:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 9780861933440.indd 5

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chronicler) continues to divide scholarly opinion, but in many ways, that any sort of stable Christian kingdom emerged in the Asturias is extraordinary.16 The Asturian mountains of the north, in stark contrast to the fertile valleys of Andalucía, Valencia or even Christian Galicia to their west, offered little in the way of rich pickings to would-be state builders; better suited to pastoralism than arable farming, by the eighth century this was a world without cities worthy of the name, existing on the fringes of Romano-Visigothic society. Be that as it may, the Asturias has assumed a central place in most attempts to write the history of early medieval Christian Spain, but quite who its inhabitants were has commanded rather less consensus. Some scholars have argued that remnants of the defeated Visigothic magnate class found refuge in the Asturian mountains, identifying the northern uplands as an auspicious place in which to revive their kingdom, as the chroniclers professed; for others, the inhabitants of this region were most probably indigenous peoples whose rhythms of life had changed little since the Iron Age.17 Either way, the ideological implications of these positions have not been missed.18 In truth accounts of the early eighth century in Spain are so meagre that little can be said about the genesis of the Asturian kingdom, or the ethno-cultural composition of its earliest leaders. What is certain is that later kings associated the foundational event of the kingdom with a victory purportedly achieved by an obscure aristocrat named Pelayo in 718 at Covadonga, as a cycle of chronicles dated to the reign of Alfonso iii (866–910) makes clear.19 Thereafter, we are on steadily surer ground, and the Christian kingdoms of Asturias and León expanded slowly southwards in the following three hundred or so years, experiencing periods of ascendancy and retrenchment. By 800 significant territorial gains had already been made from small bases in Cangas de Onís and Pravia, Asturian kings having overseen the expansion 16 A. Besga Marroquín, Orígenes hispano-godos del reino de Asturias, Oviedo 2000; L. R. Menéndez Bueyes, Reflexiones críticas sobre el reino de Asturias, Salamanca 2001. It is intriguing that the writer of the Chronicle of 754 is either uninterested in or ignorant of the events unfolding in the Asturias. 17 For a recent summary which discusses both positions see Menéndez Bueyes, Reflexiones, 22–33. The indigenist or gentilicio line was most famously defended by A. Barbero de Aguilera and M. Vigil Pascual, Sobre los orígenes sociales de la reconquista, Barcelona 1974, and La formación del feudalismo en la península ibérica, Barcelona 1978. J. Escalona reflects on Asturian royal origins to good effect in ‘Family memories: inventing Alfonso i of Asturias’, in I. Alfonso, H. Kennedy and J. Escalona (eds), Building legitimacy: political discourses and forms of legitimation in medieval societies, Leiden 2004, 223–62. 18 An excellent discussion in English is S. Barton, ‘The roots of the national question in Spain’, in M. Teich and R. Porter (eds), The national question in Europe in historical context, Cambridge 1993, 106–27 at pp. 113–16. 19 For the alleged Asturian victory at Covadonga in CAIII, see Seb., 9, 10; Rot., 9, 10. For discussion see L. A. García Moreno, ‘Covadagona, realidad y leyenda’, Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia cxciv (1997), 353–80; cf. I. Bertrand, ‘La invasión árabe y los principios de la monarquía asturiana’, Boletín del Instituto de Estudios Asturianos cviii (1983), 75–86.

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Ermesinda

Nepotianus (842)

Mauregatus (783–8)

Alfonso I ‘the Catholic’ (739–57)

Aurelius (768–74)

Fruela = ?

Peter, duke of Cantabria = ?

Adosinda = Silo (774–83)

=

(sister) = ?

Figure 1.  The kings of Asturias.

Alfonso II ‘the Chaste’ (791–842)

Fruela I ‘the Cruel’ = Munia (757–68)

Fafila = Froiluba (737–9)

Pelayo (c. 718–37) = ?

Alfonso III ‘the Great’ = Jimena (866–910)

Ordoño I = ? (850–66)

Ramiro I = ? (842–50)

Vermudo I ‘the Deacon’ = ? (788–91)

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Ordoño II = Elvira (914–24)

Fruela II (924–5)

Figure 2.  The kings of León.

Vermudo III (1028–37)

Alfonso V = Elvira (999–1028)

Elvira

Velazquita

Ordoño IV ‘the Bad’ (958–9)

Sancha = Fernando I of Castile-León (1037–65)

Ordoño

Ramiro III = Sancha (966–85)

Sancho I ‘the Fat’ = Teresa (956–8, 959–66)

Vermudo II ‘the Gouty’ = Elvira (982/4–99)

Ordoño III (951–6)

Adosinda = Ramiro II = Urraca Sánchez Alfonso IV ‘the Monk’ = Iñiga Sancho = Gotona (931–51) (of Pamplona) (925–31) (925–9)

García (910–14)

Alfonso III ‘the Great’ = Jimena (866–910)

Introduction

of their kingdom’s borders west into Galicia and eastwards towards Álava.20 Under Alfonso ii (791–842), a new royal court was established at Oviedo – the city cited in the Albeldensis as the new Toledo – and it was soon adorned with a series of fine churches and ceremonial buildings (many of which survive), already documented in the late ninth century by chroniclers.21 Ramiro i (842–50), Ordoño i (850–66) and Alfonso iii oversaw recurrent attempts to enlarge the territorial basis of the kingdom by means of frequent campaigning and the cultivation of political relationships with the regional aristocracy, but the extent to which these kings were able to govern by proxy with the collusion of such groups, or were instead unable to control frontier magnates, has been widely debated.22 The transfer, in about 910, of the royal capital to León, south of the mountains which had to some extent protected the kingdom hitherto, exposed its increasingly ambitious kings to the vast Duero valley in the northern Meseta, a large expanse of some 90,000 km². This area had probably been under the direct political control of no single central authority since the Arab-Berber conquest, but Leonese kings laid claim to much of the valley in the later ninth and tenth centuries. The victory of Ramiro ii (931–51) over the caliph ‘Abd al-Rahman iii at Simancas in 939 temporarily stemmed the flow of counter-attacks from al-Andalus; none the less, the political and military power of the Cordoban Caliphate in its tenth-century heyday was not easily withstood and the armies of the Leonese kingdom were routed throughout much of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. From about 980 Muslim forces under al-Mansur systematically defeated Leonese armies and sacked the kingdom’s key cities with impunity, devastating León in 988 and the cult site of Santiago de Compostela in 997, with which kings had carefully nurtured symbolic and political associations since the inventio (discovery) of the burial site of the apostle St James in about 830.23 Unsurprisingly, for many scholars these The best short summary remains R. Collins, ‘Spain: the northern kingdoms and the Basques’, in McKitterick, New Cambridge medieval history, ii. 272–89 at pp. 276–9. 21 Rot., 21; Seb., 21; Alb., xv, 9. 22 A. Isla Frez, La alta edad media: siglos VIII a XI, Madrid 2002, 146–51; J. M. Mínguez Fernández, La España de los siglos VI al XIII: guerra, expansión y transformaciones, San Sebastián 2004, chs x, xi; C. Estepa Díez, ‘El poder regio y los territorios’, in La época de la monarquía asturiana, Oviedo 2002, 451–76; Collins, ‘Spain’, 278–9; R. Portass, ‘The contours and contexts of public power in tenth-century Liébana’, JMH xxxviii (2012), 389–407; I. Martín Viso and A. Carvajal Castro, ‘Historias regionales de la repoblación: los reyes asturleoneses y las “políticas de la tierra” en el oeste de la meseta del Duero’, in P. Díaz Martínez, F. Corral and I. Martín Viso (eds), El historiador y la sociedad: homenaje al profesor José M. Mínguez, Salamanca 2013, 39–52. 23 For the inventio of St James’s burial site see the twelfth-century source known as the Historia Compostellana: HC, liber i, ii; cf. F. López Alsina, La ciudad de Santiago de Compostela en la alta edad media, 2nd edn, Santiago de Compostela 2013, 113–26. For an introduction to the campaigns of ‘Abd al-Rahman iii and al-Mansur see B. F. Reilly, The medieval Spains, Cambridge 1993, 84–9. For al-Mansur in Compostela see M. Fernández Rodríguez, ‘La expedición de Almanzor a Santiago de Compostela’, CHE xliii–xliv (1967), 345–63. 20

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Map 2.  The political geography of the Iberian Peninsula, c. 950.

reverses have illustrated the malaise of royal government and an attendant weakening of royal authority in the face of nascent centrifugal forces. Implicit in this interpretation is an acceptance of arguments most vehemently expressed in French scholarship and subsequently applied to large parts of France, Italy and Catalonia. These identify the period 950–1050 as one in which the social and political order was turned on its head, after the powerful territorial princes of late- and post-Carolingian France saw their authority undermined by emergent private lordship.24 Regardless of its applicability to other contexts, this supposed breach in the society and politics of the tenth and eleventh centuries is hard to identify in source material from non-Catalan Christian Spain.25 And rather than a precipitous slide into structural and institutional decrepitude, the problems that On French influence see A. Rucquoi, ‘Spanish medieval history and the Annales: between Franco and Marx’, in M. Rubin (ed.), The work of Jacques Le Goff and the challenges of medieval history, Woodbridge 1997, 123–41. 25 Catalonia is not dealt with here because it has an entirely separate historiography, which in large part reflects its different historical trajectory. 24

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Introduction

Leonese kings faced in this period were located in the inherent difficulties of political faction-building in a kingdom that was geographically very diverse and already quite large by 950. It is also telling that Asturias-León was a kingdom in which Carolingian-style consolidation of the ‘public’ polity and its apparatus had not taken place before the tenth century to the degree that it had done in what are now France and the Low Countries, rendering questions about its decline to some extent beside the point. Misconceptions of this sort display too uncritical an acceptance of French and Italian scholarship, which – although highly stimulating in French and Italian contexts – cannot simply be exported to and superimposed upon other areas of western Europe without putting its central precepts to the test.26 Did the early medieval kingdoms of Asturias and León grow exponentially, absorbing territories, defeating enemies, upholding law and justice for all via a network of regional agents, only for these foundations to be swept away by the emergence of a new social and political order in the second half of the tenth century? It is argued here that Asturias and León display their own patterns, idiosyncrasies and developments, which deserve to be treated on their own terms. Spanish historical development, in fact, was in crucial ways quite unlike that of France and Italy, and it cannot be adequately explained simply by using the history of these other countries as approximate templates. Underpinning the reorientation of the historiography of early medieval Christian Spain is a need to reconceptualise the nature of politics and society in this period, so that the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries are not viewed as an intermediate stage between the office-holding order of the late Roman world (imitated in part by the Visigoths), and the ‘feudal’ anarchy of post-Carolingian society, but as a far more complex time in which political practice was inherently unstable, and political and social development subject to extreme regional variations, conditioned by many factors.27 One such factor is the problem of scale, for the enlargement of the kingdom necessarily supposed the integration of regional elites, a process often plagued with difficulties. A particularly persistent problem presented by the expansion of the Kingdom of León was the emergence of the county of Castile and the problems that its counts, traditionally portrayed as classic ‘over-mighty subjects’, posed to various Leonese monarchs. For the proponents of one branch of conservative Spanish historiography, these events are interpreted as a portent of the Castilian foundations upon which Spain’s future late medieval and early modern greatness were built.28 However, this approach Adam Kosto has noted this tendency in his ‘What about Spain? Iberia in the historiography of medieval European feudalism’, in S. Bagge, M. H. Gelting and T. Lindkvist (eds), Feudalism: new landscapes of debate, Turnhout 2011, 135–58. 27 R. Portass, ‘All quiet on the western front? Royal politics in Galicia from c. 800 to c. 950’, EME xxi (2013), 283–306. Such an approach has found its advocates amongst those who work on other European regions, but is largely alien to Spanish scholarship. For an excellent Frankish example see M. Innes, State and society in the early Middle Ages: the middle Rhine valley, 400–1000, Cambridge 2000, 4–12. 28 J. Pérez de Urbel, Historia del condado de Castilla, Madrid 1945. 26

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relies on a nationalist teleology which has been significantly criticised, and historians are now alive to the myriad regional factions which competed for a stake in the rule of early medieval Christian Spain.29 Furthermore, although it is indeed possible to trace the growing importance of Castile throughout the late ninth and tenth centuries, for much of the same period a Galician magnate class, to some extent marginalised by the historiography, was at least as influential, and León never lost its importance as a political centre.30 These competing interest groups did not yet think of themselves as players in the construction of a single Catholic polity bent upon the liberation of the peninsula, no matter how much this story has since come to matter to orthodox Spanish historiography.31 Rather, in the period analysed here, magnate factions jostled for position and advantage, and if they created the conditions which eventually led to the emergence of a hegemonic Castile, it was not by design. How then to explain the defeats inflicted upon the Kingdom of León by the Caliphate in the late tenth century, as well as the numerous bouts of internecine violence amongst magnate groups, if not by way of allusion to steadily weakening kingship and the rise of Castilian magnate power? One way is by recognising that the Umayyads had never before thrown the full might of their hugely-resourced professional army at the northern kingdoms in such concerted and determined fashion. In addition, comparison with neighbouring kingdoms can also shed some light on this matter. The impetus that characterised the much more thorough fragmentation of the West Frankish polity in the later ninth and early tenth century developed in part because aristocratic factions opted out of supporting the conceptual and political apparatus tied to kingship with the same zeal that their forebears once had; this was particularly so after the Carolingian dynasty faced a succession crisis in the 880s, which denuded pretenders of the ideological legitimacy that the scions of Charlemagne had expected as their birth right.32 In essence, as the illusion of omnipotence attached to Carolingian kingship slowly receded, the rule of Frankish sub-kingdoms and provinces – for so long delegated by Carolingians – fell into the hands of powerful regional figures now prepared to go it alone. As a result, central control over the peripheral lands of what had been Charlemagne’s empire was dealt a shattering blow in western Francia. On the special role afforded to Castile in the construction of orthodox Spanish historiography see Barton, ‘The roots’, 118–21. J. Escalona provides an excellent synopsis of orthodox Spanish historiography: Sociedad y territorio en la alta edad media castellana: la formación del Alfoz de Lara, Oxford 2002, 3–13. 30 A. Isla Frez, whose emphasis on the essential weakness of royal power is not shared here, has none the less written the clearest account of the primacy of Galician magnates in the tenth century: La sociedad gallega en la alta edad media, Madrid 1992, 180–202. 31 Here one example can stand for countless others: Pérez de Urbel, Castilla, passim. 32 M. Costambeys, M. Innes and S. MacLean, The Carolingian world, Cambridge 2011, 425–7; cf. S. MacLean, ‘The Carolingian response to the revolt of Boso, 879–887’, EME x (2001), 21–48. MacLean suggests that the crisis of the Carolingians was a crisis of dynastic accident, not of inherent structural weakness. 29

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Introduction

And although royal authority ebbed and flowed in the former Carolingian territories throughout the tenth century, retaining considerable influence in the East Frankish kingdom, for a variety of reasons West Frankish kings ceased to be able to control many such outlying regions, with both counts and lesser lords operating autonomously. These former ‘officers of the crown’ were no longer presented with such good reasons to legitimise their authority by demonstrating rhetorical and (to a lesser degree) practical loyalty to the king.33 Remarkably, West Frankish kings even ran out of land to give to aristocrats and lost control over the nomination of counts. These huge symbolic and practical blows to royal authority did not afflict Leonese kings, and the dynamic that characterised the development of their kingdom was quite the reverse – its borders were considerably expanded throughout the period here examined, and its ideological basis reinforced.34 Neither the conceptual nor the structural coherence of kingship was undermined by the reverses of the later part of the tenth century: factional discord was just that, and the game of politics necessitated the alignment of regional factions with the king, a process which served the interests of both parties. It pays to remember too that magnate rebellion need not always be a sign of the weakness of central or public authority, but rather of the inability of particular kings to draw support from certain sections of their aristocracy, precisely because of royal assertiveness. What fuelled the frequent civil discord of the later tenth century was simply the series of defeats and despoliations inflicted upon the Leonese heartlands by the Cordoban Caliphate, which gave kings fewer bargaining chips with which to placate the regional aristocracy.35 In essence, however, although aristocrats were becoming richer and more influential, many still relied on royal patronage, land-grants and the investiture in offices such as comes (count) for legitimacy, all of which were a direct source of wealth in themselves. Kings were, in fact, surrounded by counts and bishops throughout the tenth century and beyond, and the loyalty of considerable magnate families is documented throughout significant stretches of this period.36 Thus, to paint this period as one in which the centre was irretrievably fractured after Astur-Leonese expansion in the preceding two hundred years is J. Dunbabin, France in the making, 843–1180, 2nd edn, Oxford 2000, 8–9, 31–5. Consider too the careers of men like Count Ramnulf ii of Poitiers, who declared himself king of Aquitaine in 887, or Rudolf of Burgundy, elected king of Burgundy by the regional aristocracy in about 888. Subkings had ruled in France throughout the ninth century, but they were made by direct royal appointment before the Carolingian dynastic crisis of the 880s, as Janet Nelson, among others, has shown: J. Nelson, ‘The Frankish kingdoms, 814–898: the west’, in McKitterick, New Cambridge medieval history, ii. 110–41. 34 Dunbabin, France, 31–3. Similar developments are discussed in West, Feudal revolution, ch. iv. 35 R. A. Fletcher, St James’s catapult: the life and times of Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela, Oxford 1984, 19. 36 J. M. Fernández del Pozo, Alfonso V (999–1028), Vermudo III (1028–1037), Burgos 1999, 65–8. 33

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to simplify the nature of royal politics, which were always more complex and multifaceted than much of the historiography allows. Disputed successions and factional rivalries were not necessarily symptoms of the demise of the conceptual cohesion of kingship but were on the contrary the very stuff of politics in early medieval Spain. Certainly, some Leonese kings seem to have fallen foul of leading magnates (Sancho i, the Fat, 956–8, 960–6 is one colourful example), but this weakness derived from the exigencies of Realpolitik, and not the gradual eclipse of royal authority throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries. These were, in other words, problems of circumstance, not structural decrepitude.37 It is indeed hard to see the protracted disputes between magnates from across the northern peninsula, which culminated in the accession of Fernando i, count of Castile, as king of León in 1037, as evidence for anything other than the fact that unified kingship of the Christian realms still retained an ideological foothold in the minds of the aspirants to political power. This book therefore offers a very different vision of the turbulent political consolidation of the Kingdom of León from that which has found favour in Spanish academia since the 1970s. It argues that if we are prepared to concede that conquest and reconquest tell too simplistic a story, then so too must we be prepared to accept that the notion of consolidation followed by tenth-century crisis is ripe for re-examination. For, as the eleventh century dawned, the infant Alfonso v was still able to claim some degree of political control over a vast area that stretched from the Cantabrian coast (excluding the Basque Country) to the Duero valley, and from the Ebro valley west to Galicia. It is with no little irony in fact, given the emphasis that has been placed on northern Christian political breakdown by many scholars, that if one wishes to locate political crisis in the Iberian Peninsula in the eleventh century, and a concomitant fracture of the centre, one needs to look to the Caliphate. There, the prestige of the Caliphal office had been so damaged by the concentration of power in the hands of the hajib (chief minister) al-Mansur that after the death of his son al-Muzaffar in 1008, the Caliphate unravelled in such dramatic fashion that Córdoba never again enjoyed political or cultural hegemony; by 1031, the ornament of the world had lost its lustre, but feudal political crisis in the north was nowhere to be seen.

On the decline of royal power see Mínguez Fernández, La España, chs x, xi, and ‘Ruptura social e implantación del feudalismo en el noroeste peninsular (siglos viii–x)’, SHHM iii (1985), 7–32. A broadly similar line is taken by C. Estepa Díez, who writes, with regard to the tenth-century kings of León, of ‘una auténtica declive, favorecido también por las tendencias centrífugas de algunos miembros de la aristocracia’: El nacimiento de León y Castilla (siglos VIII–X), Valladolid 1985, 25–31 at p. 30. 37

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Introduction

Small worlds: local society and social relations The nature and workings of aristocratic politics represent only one aspect of the development of Spanish society in the early Middle Ages. To understand something of everyday life for the peasantry, we need to turn to the village, which was as political an environment as any other, its inhabitants mired in petty squabbles with neighbours, its leading figures on the lookout for advantage at every turn. These and many other aspects of daily life are examined here in relation to two regions of northern Spain: the Liébana valley, in Cantabria, and an area centred on Celanova, in the western half of the province of Orense, in southern Galicia.38 These two case studies, when analysed in comparative fashion, emphasise the considerable variation which characterised the development of early medieval Spain at the subregional level: local society, though superficially similar from one region to the next, none the less developed differently in the Liébana to how it did in southern Galicia, as did the public sphere of political action, and the scale of aristocratic landholding. But rather than simply serve notice of these differences, it is important to join some of the dots between apparently unconnected phenomena. These interconnections, hard to pinpoint as they undoubtedly are, gave early medieval society its distinctive character, but they can be drawn more clearly when we reconstruct the small worlds which together formed Christian Spain in the centuries after 711. The study of one region alongside another is perhaps the best way of simultaneously highlighting similarity and difference, and the advantage of comparative methodology in a study of this sort is that conclusions may be tested. Insights can be drawn from a willingness to compare and contrast, not the least of which is the enhanced capacity it affords to evaluate broader patterns of change, and, just as importantly, to appreciate the pace of change.39 The selection of suitable case studies is also vital. Southern Galicia, in the remote north-western corner of the Iberian Peninsula, and the Liébana valley, a fertile oasis set high amidst the Picos de Europa mountains close to the northern coast in Cantabria, lend themselves very neatly to fruitful comparison. Both are worlds of green and grey. In the Celanova region of Galicia, warm summer sunshine and significant winter rains now fall upon granite villages, interspersed in a verdant landscape of rolling hills and meadowland. By contrast, the mountain valley The Liébana valley is an area of approximately 575 kms²; the comarca of Tierra de Celanova, approximately 510 kms². The area known since the late Roman period as Gallaecia extended well beyond the current boundaries of Galicia. 39 This methodology has not, however, found great favour in Spain, where little inter– regional comparison has been carried out. One notable exception is I. Martín Viso, Poblamiento y estructuras sociales en el norte de la península ibérica: siglos VI–XIII, Salamanca 2000. For discussion see C. Wickham, ‘Problems in doing comparative history’, in P. Skinner (ed.), Challenging the boundaries of medieval history: the legacy of Timothy Reuter, Turnhout 2009, 5–28, and ‘Problems of comparing rural societies in early medieval western Europe’, TRHS 6th ser. ii (1992), 221–46, and M. Bloch, Feudal society, 2nd edn, London 1965, trans. by L. Manyon of La Société féodale, Paris 1939–40. 38

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of the Liébana enjoys unusually hot summers in comparison with the rest of the Cantabrian chain, limestone mountains encircling villages set amongst rich workable farmland, perched perilously on the steep hillsides. But these regions are alike in many interesting ways. They are both relatively difficult to access, thanks to the almost impassable Picos de Europa which enclose the Liébana, and the Leonese Mountains of the Cantabrian chain which cut Galicia off from the rest of Spain, simultaneously highlighting the relative ease of southward movement into Portugal. Both were in the early Middle Ages and in large part remain overwhelmingly rural areas characterised by the relative sparseness of urban settlement. Both, too, are areas thought to have undergone a less far-reaching process of Romanisation than was broadly typical for Spain, and were distant from Roman and Visigothic political capitals. Perhaps most crucially, there is also the question of source material to consider, for both areas are quite well documented for the period under study, which allows for the detailed reconstruction of their village societies.40 Major collections of charters exist from across the entire northern fringe of the peninsula, from Galicia to Aragón, and although the majority survive as copies collected in cartularies by monks of the central or later Middle Ages, whose interests could well have influenced their transcriptions, a substantial body of ‘originals’ survives.41 As in most of western Europe, Spanish charters were highly formulaic with regard to structure and language, notwithstanding regional variations; the consolidation and repeated utilisation of stock phrases led to a uniformity of aspect that lent these documents a formal quality, thereby helping to legitimise the transactions that they recorded in the eyes of the participants and the wider community.42 That there were accepted ways of writing things down – consisting of more or less widely known invocations, pieties and warning clauses – points to the functional utility of these documents to their owners, and the frequent recourse to this sort of documentation in court cases is proof enough of the legal importance attached to it.43 The formulaic aspect, however, can cause problems for the historian. For a start, charters can be dry The starting place for discussion of early medieval documentation is now W. C. Brown, M. Costambeys, M. Innes and A. J. Kosto (eds), Documentary culture and the laity in the early Middle Ages, Cambridge 2013, and, of particular relevance here, Kosto ‘Sicut mos esse solet: documentary practices in Christian Iberia’ at pp. 259–82; A. J. Kosto and A. Winroth (eds), Charters, cartularies and archives: the preservation and transmission of documents in the medieval West: proceedings of a colloquium of the commission internationale de diplomatique (Princeton and New York, 16–18 September 1999), Toronto 2002; and J. Jarrett and A. S. McKinley (eds), Problems and possibilities of early medieval charters, Turnhout 2013. 41 Of some 3,900 charters, approximately 830, or about a fifth of the corpus, survive as originals. For this information I am indebted to G. Barrett, ‘The written and the world in early medieval Iberia’, unpubl. DPhil. diss. Oxford 2015, 18–19. 42 W. Davies, Acts of giving: individual, community and Church in tenth-century Christian Spain, Oxford 2007, ch. iv. 43 R. Collins, ‘Visigothic law and regional custom in disputes in early medieval Spain’, in W. Davies and P. Fouracre (eds), The settlement of disputes in early medieval Europe, Cambridge 40

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Introduction

and confusing, their narrative content sometimes only imperfectly coherent. Further difficulties can stem from the Latin in which the charters were written (a subject which has its own historiography), from the inconsistencies or lacunae in their narrative content, or from the dates assigned to individual charters, sometimes plainly anachronistic.44 Distinguishing between the participants in transactions can also be problematic, due to irregularities or ambiguities related to the use of personal names, pronouns and patronyms. Yet the possibilities of this sort of documentation comfortably eclipse the difficulties. Charters personalise the history of the village. They speak to us of the actions and concerns of named, often non-noble personages. In short, they shed light on aspects of everyday life in ways that other sources cannot. Casting the net wider, charters also allow us to reconstruct networks of family and patronage, which in turn has significant ramifications for our conception of local community in this period. In a specifically Spanish context, charter material is important since it is so feebly supported by narrative accounts, meaning that it is often only charters that allow us to assemble a basic chronology, particularly for events beyond the royal court at León. In this respect, the later part of the period covered in this book is especially poorly served. The Chronicle of Sampiro is the only major narrative source in Latin to provide an account of the events of the tenth century.45 An early eleventhcentury chronicle that survives in two imperfect later versions, it was written by a notary of the Leonese court who later governed the diocese of Astorga as bishop from c. 1031 to c. 1041. Its writer was evidently well informed about the events that he describes. Even so, the Chronicle of Sampiro offers little of any use for the reconstruction of local society, its focus falling instead on the travails of kings and the machinations of their magnates. Thus, for regional perspectives, we need to look to the 3,900 or so tenthcentury charters that survive from Christian Iberia (excluding Catalonia). But what to do with such seemingly arid and formulaic material? Reacting in large part to analyses of the early medieval European past that examined local society and networks of power almost exclusively via the prism of prescriptive and exhortatory sources (typically, but not exclusively, law codes), historians have since the 1980s looked to charters to provide them with evidence of actual social practice, that is, with vignettes of life ‘on the ground’. These historians have created a significant body of work, providing a detailed local perspective for

1986, 85–104; W. Davies, ‘Judges and judging: truth and justice in northern Iberia on the eve of the millennium’, JMH xxxvi (2010), 193–203. 44 On Latin, Alice Rio’s comments are very interesting: Legal practice and the written word in the early Middle Ages: Frankish formulae, c. 500–c.1000, Cambridge 2009, 15–18. 45 The best secondary study remains A. Isla Frez, ‘La monarquía leonesa según Sampiro’, in M. I. Loring García (ed.), Historia social, pensamiento historiográfico y edad media: homenaje al Prof. Abilio Barbero de Aguilera, Madrid 1997, 33–57. For an edition and critical commentary see Sampiro, su crónica y la monarquía leonesa en siglo X, ed. J. Pérez de Urbel, Madrid 1956.

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many areas of western Europe, with revelatory results.46 The true achievement of these historians has been to alert us to the complexity and richness of this material: for instance, it is now clear that although charters assuredly offer perspectives on early medieval societies that bring us closer to ‘real life’ than do law codes, these documents cannot be divorced from the circumstantial, ideological or authorial context in which they were created. Such factors are crucial, for although charters were ostensibly private documents, their production and use necessarily entailed the participation of outside parties, from scribes to witnesses, and from court officials to plaintiffs. Charters were by no means the colourless formulations of practised local draughtsmen, but instead offer a rich seam of information about the composition, structure and practices of early medieval communities. These communities produced charters because they needed them to arrange their affairs. The majority of charters record transactions of land, and are usually records of gift, sale, exchange and dispute, often involving the monasteries and cathedral churches whose archives stored these documents, ensuring their survival. On this latter point, it is crucial to recognise that survival is for the most part not a matter of chance; written title to land proved ownership and was therefore a useful tool for institutions and private individuals alike.47 Thus, on occasions where the link between the content of a charter and the monastery which collected it is unclear, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the monastery at some later stage may well have held an interest in the persons, places or assets which the document describes, in many cases because a lay person gave land or documents (or both) to the institution in question. The fact remains though that the material comes from a very specific ambit, reflecting the interests of ecclesiastical elites and their patrons. And given that these interest groups necessarily selected what they wanted to retain and copy, it is very likely that this selection may not offer a representative sample.48 Many documents which recorded transaction between peasants may well have been drafted, only to have escaped the attention of institutions with the infrastructure and inclination to have retained them, and thereby been lost to posterity. So much must have depended on the interests and motives of the creators of archives, and, later, the compilers of cartularies; as a consequence, patterns of gift and sale must always be discussed with caution, and conclusions nuanced by these considerations. Some documents which do not seem to follow the broadly dominant pattern of gift or sale to the monastery in whose archives they came to rest have none the less ‘slipped through’, offering further insights on peasant activity. Such activity is striking for its dynamism and variety. Indeed, so great are the differences between the assets changing hands Davies and Fouracre, Settlement of disputes, passim. This is so even though the accidental retention of documents sometimes took place: certain charters may have been misunderstood by archivists, or even separated from their original contexts. 48 Rio, Legal practice, 12. 46 47

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Introduction

amongst the actors whom we witness in the charters that it is very difficult to imagine that this was not a world of considerable social variation. Recognising as much is key, since charter material was in one sense not solely the preserve of the literate and powerful, and this can help us to see society in the round in a way that chronicles, with their focus on the highly selective and unbalanced political narratives of kings and their magnates, simply cannot. The historiography of early medieval Spain One of the more challenging tasks facing the historian of early medieval Spain is that of unpicking the tangled strands of history and historiography. What is at stake is no small matter for it has to do with the attempts of rival traditions to situate the Spanish early Middle Ages within a longer and more expansive sweep of ‘national’ history. In this respect, the Spanish experience is not unique: it has long been recognised that national schools or traditions of historical writing are forged in part by borrowing from the medieval past.49 In Spain, however, the search for signs of medieval precedent or origin has acquired unusually potent political significance: indeed, as Julio Escalona has pointed out, the debate about the trajectory of Spain throughout the Middle Ages has been treated in the twentieth century as a debate on ‘el ser de España’ – that is, the very ‘being’ of Spain itself.50 How this debate came to assume such wide significance has much to do with the utilisation, or rejection, of key strands of an even older historiographical tradition associated with the notions of reconquest (reconquista), depopulation (despoblación) and repopulation (repoblación), given their most famous expression in the work of Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz.51 The first of the major scholarly paradigms to win acceptance amongst a broad swathe of medieval historians in twentieth-century Spain owed much to the work of Sánchez-Albornoz, an historian of conservative-liberal temperament whose hostility to the Franco regime obliged him to work for most of his professional career in Argentina. This notwithstanding, his work was always influential in Spain too, for his preoccupations fitted well with those of more orthodox Francoist historiography. One of his most lasting contributions was his promotion of a theory that argued that the Duero valley had been depopulated in the wake of the Arab-Berber invasion of 711, due to the migration northwards of peasant farmers seeking to inhabit those areas free of Arab In a Spanish context see C. Wickham, Framing the early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800, Oxford 2005, and ‘The early Middle Ages and national identity’, in N. Fryde, P. Monnet, O. G. Oexle and L. Zygner (eds), Die Deutung der mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft in der Moderne, Göttingen 2006, 107–22. 50 Escalona, Sociedad y territorio, 8. 51 The classic accounts are C. Sánchez-Albornoz, Despoblación y repoblación del valle del Duero, Buenos Aires 1966, and España, un enigma histórico, Buenos Aires 1956, ch. xii. 49

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political dominance; this interpretation depended heavily on a literal reading of the Chronicle of Alfonso III, which claimed that this process was sparked by royal directive and enthusiastically taken up by pioneering peasants.52 Demographic balance was restored at various stages of the later ninth and tenth centuries, which saw the resettlement of many free peasant cultivators in this same region, as the Astur-Leonese kingdoms assumed more coherent and stable control of the areas lying to the south of the Cantabrian chain. Thus, after depopulation (despoblación) came repopulation (repoblación), which rested on the belief that those seen purchasing or asserting their rights to land in charter material were in the majority of cases free peasant newcomers. The free peasant therefore acquired a charged symbolism in the Sánchez-Albornoz hypothesis, since he or she was necessarily a direct agent of reconquest – the slow and hard-fought recovery of the peninsula from Islam. Moreover, the smallscale political elites of the Asturian kingdom, according to Sánchez-Albornoz, expanded southwards in piecemeal fashion, exerting only a superficial authority over free peasant proprietors – conditions which were not ripe for the intense exploitation and violent hierarchies thought to be characteristic of the feudal world. This, then, emphasised a major point of difference from the early and central medieval history of much of the rest of western Europe. But in spite of this very different emphasis, peasant studies per se did not represent a particularly rich seam of historical investigation in post civil-war Spain.53 What was quintessentially Spanish about these peasants was therefore hard to pin down; Sánchez-Albornoz opted for a vague, rather mystical definition, which owed a great deal to the introspective and essentialist ambience that marked the ‘Generation of 1898’ so deeply.54 For him, Spain’s identity was born in the crucible of landscape, people, God and kingship, these heady elements over time imposing an overlapping commonality of unique – peculiarly Spanish – experience. Others, as Peter Linehan has pointed out, sought their answer in the vehemence of Spanish religious experience; for them, quite simply, ‘Spain was Spain because Spain was Catholic’.55 Whether emphasis was placed on a free peasantry of Hispano-Germanic stock, or the providential recreation of the glories of the Toledan court, Sánchez-Albornoz thought this trajectory sufficiently different from that of other western European nations to enable him to assert the uniqueness of Escalona provides an excellent synopsis of the major historiographical paradigms of the twentieth century and their problems: Sociedad y territorio, 3–13. 53 Idem, ‘The early Castilian peasantry: an archaeological turn?’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies ii (2009), 119–45. 54 This is the name given to the large group of artists, writers and thinkers for whom colonial disaster in 1898 is said to have precipitated an outpouring of artistic and intellectual introspection and a subsequent rejuvenation of Spanish letters: J. Millán, ‘El “desastre” del 98 i la crisi social de l’Estat liberal espanyol’, Pasado y Memoria: Revista de Historia Contemporánea i (2002), 183–96. 55 P. Linehan, History and the historians of medieval Spain, Oxford 1993, 17. 52

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Introduction

Spanish history. Such claims for unique intangibles lie at the heart of all national metanarratives, and in some cases they are truer than others, but it is particularly easy to see how destructive they have been in the Spanish case. Conceptualised so, Spain became isolated from international historical debate in the same way that it underwent political marginalisation under Franco; it became a world unto itself which wilfully ignored comparison with the history of its neighbours.56 Consequently, the invasion of 711 marked a crucial break for the proponents of a conservative, Catholicising tradition of Spanish historical development – but the ‘grievous disasters’ recounted by the chronicler of 754, if reworked cleverly, could foretell much more than inglorious defeat. Indeed, if 711 could be recast not simply as the end of Visigothic Spain but as the beginning of a process of peninsular reconquest by Christian polities, a ‘preferable’ teleology could be reaffirmed. So successfully was this done that this vision held sway outside Spain amongst noted Hispanists long after Spanish historians had re-established links with foreign academic communities.57 Opposition to Sánchez-Albornoz’s ideas was not forthcoming in any substantial way until the pioneering work of Abilio Barbero de Aguilera and Marcelo Vigil Pascual.58 Barbero and Vigil based their investigation of the transition from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages on a completely different premise from that of Sánchez-Albornoz. Their studies attributed the underlying socio-economic causes of the changes of the early Middle Ages to the longevity of gentilicio (that is, kin-based, or tribal) social structures amongst the peoples of the mountainous northern fringe of Spain, particularly modern Asturias and Cantabria. These scholars did not consider feudalism an inherently non-Spanish phenomenon, but rather argued that feudal society in the peninsula was born directly from the breakdown of tribal structures, although quite how this came about was never made clear. It remains important to emphasise the ideological resonance that this argument quickly acquired within Spanish academia. Barbero and Vigil were not only arguing that Sánchez-Albornoz’s idea of depopulation (and of how this fitted in with the wider liberal teleology of the victory of Catholic Spain) was ill-founded; they were proposing that the agents of eighth-, ninth- and tenth-century Christian political expansion had never been substantially Romanised anyway. Thus, for Barbero and Vigil, private property, patriarchal social structures and monetary economy had little to no place in pre-feudal Cantabria.59 Escalona is right to remark on the essential irony of the fact that Sánchez-Albornoz was for all of the regime’s duration persona non grata, and yet his conception of the history of Spain could not have chimed more perfectly with the vision of Spain that Franco’s propagandists wanted to sell: Sociedad y territorio, 8 n. 35. 57 Ibid. 9 n. 43. 58 Two works of singular importance stand out: Barbero and Vigil, Sobre los orígenes and La formación. 59 Barbero and Vigil, Sobre los orígenes, 148–52. 56

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Such was the impact of this thesis that to some degree all historians of the society and politics of early medieval Spain are obliged to discuss its implications for their own analyses, although it needs to be conceded more openly that the solidity of the empirical basis of Barbero and Vigil’s ideas tends to be assumed rather than demonstrated. Few would deny, however, that their ideas breathed new life into the field. Of the myriad historical problems to have been reinvigorated by the legacy of Barbero and Vigil, some of the most significant relate to settlement structures, the village community and lordship. The study of lordship gathered great momentum in the late 1960s, with a series of studies on the landed assets and peasant client networks associated with large, mostly Castilian, monasteries; as a result ‘an image of tenth-century monks as not only oratores, but also estate managers was developed’.60 Thus, much discussion has focussed on the emergence of individuals who amassed significant landed assets at the expense of peasants – these were abbots, counts or minor aristocrats, acting ever more independently of the shackles of the supposedly (and implicitly) restraining influence of public power. The fetishisation of public power remains latent in the field, but whether it was indeed a force for good in the lives of peasants is a question that attracts scant attention. By the same token, little attempt has been made by historians to question the logic of lord-peasant relationships outside frameworks which focus solely on conflict and exploitation, in spite of the fact that such an approach risks simplifying the complexity of early medieval society. One does not need to be naïve about the essential unfairness and exploitation of many basic features of this world to realise that lords must have been, on occasion, a force for social cohesion, and their patronage actively sought by many elements of society. An attempt to address these relationships free of an a priori conflictive model informs a significant part of the analysis in this book, where I look to offer a more nuanced study of peasant experience that takes into account the roles that peasants often played at the heart of their communities, frequently engaging in what can justifiably be called ‘business transactions’.61 The business of business has also received minimal attention, and the actual workings of transaction remain a side-show to other concerns for most historians of early medieval Spain. José María Mínguez Fernández, influenced by Pierre Bonnassie’s work on Catalonia, has looked at charters, but only so as to discuss the interplay between the decay of slave society and the emergence of those peasant proprietors who would later be brought to heel by seigneurial Escalona, ‘Early Castilian peasantry’, 131. Two of the best monastic studies were J. A. García de Cortázar y Ruiz de Aguirre (henceforth García de Cortázar), El dominio del monasterio de San Millán de la Cogolla (siglos X al XIII): introducción a la historia rural de Castilla altomedieval, Salamanca 1969, and J. M. Mínguez Fernández, El dominio del monasterio de Sahagún en el siglo X: paisajes agrarios, producción y expansión económica, Salamanca 1980. 61 On ‘business’ see L. Feller, A. Gramain and F. Weber, La Fortune de Karol: marché de la terre et liens personnels dans les Abruzzes au haut moyen âge, Rome 2005. 60

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Introduction

power.62 For both Bonnassie and Mínguez Fernández, feudalism took root after a period characterised by the genesis of village communities, but it took root all the same, and in its political dimension at least it had clear tenth-century origins.63 Thus, the gradual concentration of lordly power and the gradual degradation of peasant autonomy went hand in hand, or so we are told. This book begs to differ, and argues that tenth-century villages were frequently inhabited by peasants of sufficient local purchase that they themselves, thanks to their buying and selling of landed assets, played a role in the creation of the more extreme social stratification that we see at the end of our period. And what of this role? For Reyna Pastor, collective identity, communal expression of this ideal, and resistance in the face of oppression are where the focus should lie. Conversely, for García de Cortázar, heavily influenced by sociology and geography, these themes make more sense when transmuted so as to replace repopulation with ‘acculturation’, and outright colonisation with an emphasis on the organisation of social and economic space.64 This book will largely eschew spatial analysis, in an attempt to focus wholly on relations on the ground. Martín Viso has done likewise, proposing that fortified hilltop settlements in two areas of the northern peninsula articulated social structures, but imaginative syntheses like his are far from typical.65 Most studies tend to focus on the degradation of the peasantry as a backdrop to the feudalisation of society, offering little detailed analysis of relations within the village world, even though this latter was the principal locus of such changes. The common thread running through these contributions is that they all react to the intellectual vitality of Barbero and Vigil. So too does this book, but given that emphasis here falls on peasant agency, the mobility and elasticity of social J. M. Mínguez Fernández, ‘Sociedad esclavista y sociedad gentilicia en la formación del feudalismo asturleonés’, in M. J. Hidalgo de la Vega, D. Pérez Sánchez and M. J. Rodríguez Gervás (eds), ‘Romanización’ y ‘reconquista’ en la península ibérica: nuevas perspectivas, Salamanca 1998, 283–302; P. Bonnassie, From slavery to feudalism in south western Europe, Cambridge 1991, trans. by J. Birrell of Structures féodales et féodalisme dans l’occident méditerranéen (Xe– XIIIe siècle), Rome 1980. 63 P. Bonnassie, ‘From the Rhône to Galicia: origins and modalities of the feudal order’, in his From slavery to feudalism, 104–31. 64 J. A. García de Cortázar and C. Díez Herrera, La formación de la sociedad hispano-cristiana del Cantábrico al Ebro en los siglos VIII a XI: planteamiento de una hipótesis y análisis del caso de Liébana, Asturias de Santillana y Trasmiera, Santander 1982; García de J. A. Cortázar and P. Martínez Sopena, ‘The historiography of rural society in medieval Spain’, in I. Alfonso Antón (ed.), The rural history of medieval European societies: trends and perspectives, Turnhout 2007, 93–139; R. Pastor de Togneri, Resistencias y luchas campesinas en la época del crecimiento y consolidación de la formación feudal: Castilla y León, siglos X–XIII, Madrid 1980. 65 Martín Viso, Poblamiento; J. Escalona, ‘De “señores y campesinos” a “poderes feudales y comunidades”: elementos para definir la articulación entre territorio y clases sociales en la alta edad media castellana’, in I. Álvarez Borge (ed.), Comunidades locales y poderes feudales en la edad media, Logroño 2001, 115–55. Castros are Iron Age and Roman-period stone buildings, normally situated within hillforts, found all over the north of the Iberian peninsula, and, in particular, the north-west. 62

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relations in the village world, and the complex nature of politics in this period, alternative interpretations of the society and politics of early medieval Spain come to the fore. A society transformed The northern parts of the Iberian Peninsula none the less underwent fundamental political change between 711 and 1031; this book explores aspects of local society, and the mechanisms of rule and social power, in two regions of this large area throughout the first three centuries of the period now known to us as the Reconquista. The aim is to make three broad points: first, that an uncritical acceptance of one metanarrative commonly applied to the study of this period – namely, that social structures changed as the parameters of politics underwent ‘feudalisation’ – risks distorting regional variation and diversity of social experience. Second, that peasants could, and often did, retain considerable autonomy and agency throughout the period examined here; this challenges a well-established interpretative line which focuses on increasing but ill-defined peasant subjection.66 Third, that cooperation between kings and magnates, although of varying strength according to context and circumstance, helped to shape the scale of social, economic and aristocratic power in both regions analysed here. As a result, it was less in aristocratic interests to undermine royal power than has often been claimed. Finally, a word on methodology. The approach taken in this book is broadly comparative, and each case study will be dealt with separately for the sake of clarity, although this rule will be broken occasionally in order to offer comparison at salient points throughout the text. This is not a landscape study per se: archaeological data has not been incorporated in systematic fashion, partly because so little archaeology has been done in these areas, and conclusions must remain provisional until they can be tested with more data.67 Thus the regions themselves are not the principal objects of study, but form the contextual framework for the analysis of assorted socio-economic and political phenomena as they arose, persisted, changed or ended, in two large areas, over three hundred years. The usefulness of this approach is clear: analysis of case studies from two relatively close regions can offer explanations for

For a summary of these interpretations as they have been expressed in the secondary literature see Mínguez Fernández, ‘Ruptura social’, 32: ‘En resumen: debilitamiento de la monarquía, sometimiento del campesinado, fortalecimiento de la aristocracia son los tres pilares sobre los que se sustenta la nueva organización económica, social y política cuya implantación se hace perceptible desde las primeras décadas del siglo X.’ 67 This study is therefore substantially different from that of M. Fernández Mier which systematically incorporated landscape and archaeological analyses and remains the best of its type in Spain: Génesis del territorio en la edad media: arqueología del paisaje y evolución histórica en la montaña asturiana, el valle del río Pigüeña, Oviedo 1999. 66

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Introduction

how and why aristocracies differed in scale; how and why wealth and political pre-eminence shaped aristocratic capacity to articulate local society; and how and why peasants chose either to cooperate with or to resist aristocracies. It is in this willingness to return to the sources that shed light on social and political practice that the true value of comparative history is located, for it is detailed analysis of this sort that brings these small worlds of the past alive once more.

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PART I

THE LIÉBANA

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1

Cantabria after Rome Essential to any investigation of Liébana society in the centuries analysed in this book is some discussion of the development of that society in the preceding centuries; to this end, this chapter will introduce the archaeological and documentary sources with which any attempt to do so must be undertaken. It will also analyse important early evidence from the region in order to paint a picture of Liébana society that differs in crucial respects from that of Barbero and Vigil. All historical writing on the Spanish early Middle Ages is locked in a critical dialogue with a vision of society that questions the nature and extent of Romanisation and Visigothic influence in Cantabria and the Asturias. This chapter, and the book as a whole, will argue, contra Barbero and Vigil, that northern Spanish local societies and their political and economic underpinnings were not in any meaningful way ‘tribal’, and that the northern fringe of Spain shared broad socio-economic characteristics with the rest of the peninsula in the post-Roman centuries; it will thus make the case for significant Romano-Visigothic influence in Cantabria from c.500 to c.700. This background created the socio-economic conditions that frame the patterns of landholding and social relations that emerge with increasing clarity as documents become more plentiful after 900. The evidence in context: monasteries and mountains In 790 Álvaro and various men and women from Aquas Calidas (Las Caldas), a small hamlet set high above the narrow gorge that leads to the Liébana from the north, decided to record the foundation of their new monastic community in a charter.1 This document, a simple enough statement of the pact that was to set the rules by which they would live, is the oldest to survive in the cartulary of Santo Toribio de Liébana, the principal source for the region. It is also one of only two surviving eighth-century documents. Some fifteen ninth-century Santo Toribio documents are augmented by only four from the smaller and less well known monastery of Santa María de Piasca, giving in total twentyone documents before 900. It is only when the tenth-century documentation is considered – sixty documents from the Santo Toribio cartulary, plus some twenty-two from Piasca – that we can begin to work with a relatively substantial

T1.

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body of charters.2 Whilst these are not large numbers, it needs to be borne in mind that the particular geographical context from which the documents derive enhances their likelihood of offering a representative picture of Liébana society; this is because the Liébana documents all describe patterns of land use and transaction within a single mountain valley of only 575 km² in extent, of which a large proportion of the territory is uninhabited. Thus, although by no means a closed world (as the active scriptorium of the eighth-century monk Beatus implies), the Liébana was populated by a local society whose geographical horizons were circumscribed by the mountains that enclosed its landed holdings; in this context, the documents attain a value that their numbers alone might not warrant elsewhere.3 By far the most important of these documents are the Santo Toribio charters, edited in 1948 by Luis Sánchez Belda. They survive in a cartulary that was one of many items stored in the monastic archive at Santo Toribio before the confiscation of much of its documentary collection in the nineteenth century.4 This material, including the cartulary, is now stored in the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid, having been moved at some stage during the desamortización, the process of confiscations imposed upon monastic institutions by Spanish liberals in the nineteenth century. Throughout the period examined in this book, Santo Toribio went by the name of San Martín de Turieno, after the hamlet by which it is situated, and its documents were seemingly not collated until well after the monastery underwent rededication in the twelfth century.5 Two hands, both dating to the early fourteenth century, For the Piasca charters (henceforth P1, P2, P3 etc.), see Piasca. This collection consists of documents from two sources: the ‘Sección Clero’ of the Sahagún archive, in the Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, and a cartulary from the Biblioteca Menéndez Pelayo in Santander. Seventeen of the total of twenty-two tenth-century Piasca charters are from the Sahagún archive; these are originals (that is, a charter on a single sheet of parchment and not a later copy; this does not preclude the possibility that several originals may have been produced) and all seventeen also survive as copies in Santander. The remaining five tenth-century Piasca charters are cartulary copies from Santander that do not survive in the Sahagún material: P9 (943); P11 (945); P20 (979); P23 (981); and P24 (983). 3 Beatus (?–c. 800) was a learned monk who is thought to have written at San Martín de Turieno in the late eighth century; his erudition extended to a sound knowledge of the Church Fathers, as well as many other Christian theologians, suggesting first-hand acquaintance with a wide array of texts. He became embroiled in the Adoptionist controversy of the eighth century, but is more famous for a series of works associated with his scriptorium. His most famous work, the Commentary on the Apocalypse, written in about 775, became an important text after his death and survives in more than thirty manuscripts, although the autograph is lost. The authorship of this text is ascribed to Beatus on account of the dedication made to Eterio of Osma in the second redaction of the text (786). For Beatus see J. Williams, ‘Beato de Liébana y la tradición del Beato’, in P. A. Fernández Vega and R. Peña Suárez (eds), Apocalipsis: el ciclo histórico del beato de Liébana, Santander 2006, 107–16. 4 Santo Toribio, p. xxxviii. 5 The first documented indication of the adoption of the name of Santo Toribio is found in T104 (1125), in which the monastery was referred to as that of San Martín and Santo 2

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have been identified in the cartulary, which is now in a notably poor state of repair.6 One of these hands has been identified as that of a fourteenthcentury prior named Toribio.7 The second hand cannot be identified. After sixty tenth-century charters, only twenty-five and twenty-two documents survive from the eleventh and twelfth centuries respectively; however, sixty-six thirteenth-century charters point to an upturn in the monastery’s fortunes, and it is possible that this necessitated the reordering of the monastic archive in the following century. More can be said about the mountain setting in which these documents were written. The earliest detailed narrative accounts of the beginnings of the reconquest, the Alfonsine cycle of ninth-century chronicles, demonstrate an awareness of the symbolism of the mountain setting to the origins of the Asturian kingdom. This conception is one which resonated well into the twentieth century, and with particular force in the Liébana. Celebrated by Sánchez Belda in his introductory comments to the cartulary of Santo Toribio as a stronghold against Arab aggression, the Liébana, we are told, ‘offered welcome refuge in the years of invasion’.8 Furthermore, the fact that it was never conquered or held by any of the Muslim polities installed in Spain from 711 has been taken to illustrate the Liébana’s providential role in the reconquest, made plain by the court propagandists of Alfonso iii, who chose this dramatic landscape as the setting for the first display of divine disfavour to be visited upon the Arabs after their defeat at Covadonga in 718.9 The Cantabrian Mountains and the highlands of the Asturias thus saw themselves absorbed into the Spanish historical narrative as the source of political, social and cultural regeneration. They were both the providential refuge and the point of departure in a narrative which saw Pelayo’s victory as the first step towards the recovery of the peninsula. In some senses this story is not unique, for mountains and their uneasy alliance with human populations had been mined for rhetorical or propagandistic value since long before the Asturian kingdom of the eighth century.10 But as the complexity of the relationship between history and geography has become better understood, so too has a growing awareness of the sheer diversity

Toribio. By the time of T111 (1181), the appellation of San Martín de Turieno seems to have disappeared, hence the reference ‘in domo Sancti Toribii’. 6 Santo Toribio, p. xl. 7 Ibid. 8 ‘ofreció cómodo refugio en los años de la invasión’: ibid. p. x. 9 Rot., 10; Seb., 10; Alb., xv, 1. An Arab army is destroyed by an earthquake caused by the Lord. 10 One thinks, to cite just one example, of Tacitus’s spirited description of the Caledonians, who suffered the curtailment of their ancestral freedom at the hands of the historian’s father-in-law Gaius Cornelius Agricola: Tacitus on Britain and Germany: a new translation of the Agricola and the Germania, ed. H. Mattingly, London 1948, 80–1.

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of local societies in early medieval Europe, especially in mountain settings.11 With this in mind, some knowledge of local characteristics is of crucial importance in a region like the Liébana, where geographical features are said to give it its distinctive character.12 The Liébana forms the south-western subregion of the modern autonomous region of Cantabria, which can be roughly divided into two morphologically distinct zones. The coastal strip of the northern fringe is mostly made up of low valleys and sandy dunes. To the south the terrain becomes much more difficult as a barrier of limestone mountains running more or less parallel to the Cantabrian Sea dominates the landscape. The most spectacular mountains of this chain form the Picos de Europa, which demarcate the north-western limits of the Liébana. Rather unusually, mountains surround the whole of the region, effectively encircling it, with the Cantabrian chain forming the region’s southern boundary, and the Peña Sagra its north-eastern limits. The Liébana is thus an enclosed, mountainous micro-region, in which the cultivable land is very starkly delineated by the almost complete ring of mountains which defines its physical contours. Narrow passes lead to and from the Liébana from both the north and the south, and journeying along them must have represented a significant undertaking in the medieval period. The mountains enclose a system of four major valleys (Valdebaró, Cillorigo, Valdeprado and Cereceda) which meet in the town of Potes, the administrative capital of the modern region and a settlement known to have existed in the ninth century.13 The Liébana is also unusual in other respects. The river Deva, which runs through the region via the most westerly of its major valleys (Valdebaró), descends to just three hundred metres above sea-level at the lowest point of its course. The steep gradient at which the mountains rise from the valley is visually striking, but it also has significant climatic consequences for the region. The proximity of the Cantabrian Sea, which is only thirty kilometres north of the Liébana, works in conjunction with the mountains to create dramatic conditions. Effectively, the mountains trap the banks of humid air which drift southwards from the sea, forcing them to ascend towards the mountain peaks; this causes high levels of rainfall in the higher zones, but reduces rainfall in

11 An excellent guide to the usefulness of investigating the complex relationships between both the historical dimension of geography and the geographical dimension of history is A. R. Baker, Geography and history: bridging the divide, Cambridge 2003, 182–93. Recent analyses which appreciate the significance of geographical approaches to historical study include R. Balzaretti, M. Pearce and C. Watkins (eds), Ligurian landscapes: studies in archaeology, geography and history, London 2004; R. Balzaretti, Dark Age Liguria: regional identity and local power, c. 400–1020, London 2013; and P. P. Viazzo, Upland communities: environment, population and social structure in the Alps since the sixteenth century, Cambridge 1989. 12 J. C. García Codrón and V. Carracedo Martín Gimena, ‘Liébana: el espacio en blanco’, in Liébana y letras, Santander 2008, 11–24. For the region’s geography see M. Pereda de la Reguera, Liébana y Picos de Europa, Santander 1972. 13 ‘illa strata publica que discurrit ad Pautes’: T9 (847).

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the lower reaches dramatically.14 Thus, summers in the lower reaches of the Liébana up to about 600 metres in altitude are continental or Mediterranean in many respects, marked by intense heat and little rainfall. The mid-zones of the mountain slopes experience much more rainfall, moderate temperatures and generally damper conditions, whilst the peaks are characterised by Alpine conditions, including heavy snowfall during a significant part of the year. In conjunction with the steep slopes that characterise the mountain sides, such an environment supports an abundance of flora and fauna, and this micro-climate provides suitable conditions for the cultivation of an extensive range of crops. The warm summers of the lower extensions of the valleys ensure that vines and cereals can be grown successfully in these zones, and great numbers of fruit trees grow high up on the mountain sides.15 Irrigation is largely unnecessary, even in the summer months, since myriad rivers and streams ensure that the land is well watered.16 The higher reaches are patchily forested, and a wide variety of trees is found in the region as a whole, offering a pleasing aspect from all vantage points.17 Yet the landscape and climate of the Liébana are more than a picturesque distraction, for these conditions provide the region with a range of economic possibilities not normally associated with a mountain valley, an enticing prospect for the socially and politically ambitious. Land was indeed highly sought after, and the charters bear this out, particularly in certain well-documented phases of gift and sale. The mountains can therefore confound expectations. Braudel, for instance, claimed that ‘the plains aimed for progress and the hills for survival’, but in the Liébana the socio-economic patterns of this isolated mountain valley were characterised by something akin to a plains economy.18 What, then, of the human activity that this landscape witnessed?

‘la montaña detiene y obliga a ascender a las masas de aire húmedo procedente del océano favoreciendo con ello un incremento de las precipitaciones a barlovento y en las zonas más altas pero una reducción muy notable en las bajas que se ven afectadas por el efecto “föhn”’: García Codrón and Carracedo Martín Gimena, ‘Liébana: el espacio en blanco’, 16. 15 In T3 (826), Froila donated to abbot Lavi and the church of San Esteban de Mieses all that he owned in Lebeña and Vesarbado, including ‘terras, vineas, pomiferas’. In T64 (962), Severa donated to Savarico and Vistrilli her inheritance in Liébana, with land and various trees: ‘terras, almenedebares … et maçanares et perales’. 16 ‘el hecho de que el Deva, debido a la erosión, desposite en sus orillas materiales orgánicos, ha creado una rica vega donde crece el trigo hasta los 900m y la vid hasta los 600m’: M. E. Álvarez Llopis, ‘Aldeas y solares en Liébana: Argüébanes, Turieno y Potes’, in J. A. García de Cortázar (ed.), Del Cantábrico al Duero: trece estudios sobre organización social del espacio en los siglos VIII al XIII, Santander 1999, 189–227 at p. 197. 17 For more information see García Codrón and Carracedo Martín Gimena, ‘Liébana: el espacio en blanco’, 18–19. 18 F. Braudel, The Mediterranean in the ancient world, London 2001, 15, trans by S. Reynolds of Les Mémoires de la Méditerranée, Paris 1998. 14

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Politics and society in Cantabria, c. 500–800 Having situated the major repository of documentary evidence for the medieval Liébana in its specific geographical setting, questions emerge regarding the texture of politics and society in Cantabria in the period from 500 to 800. Later sources point to the early eighth century as a turning point in the political cohesion of the wider region. The Chronicle of Alfonso III states that it was during the reign of Alfonso i (739–57) that the Asturian kingdom could lay claim to some sort of political control over the Liébana.19 But how might those communities that greeted the earliest royal agents of Alfonso i be characterised? And is it possible to know anything about this world before charter evidence begins in earnest, after 800? Barbero and Vigil famously argued that the Roman and Visigothic imprint upon the society of the northern fringe of the peninsula was minimal and superficial, particularly in the isolated Cantabrian chain, but this assertion is increasingly indefensible. For a start, it is built upon an evolutionist model of human societies that has been called into question by numerous anthropological case studies, although the implications of this fact are frequently passed over in the Spanish-language secondary literature.20 Even allowing for this unsatisfactory state of affairs, Barbero and Vigil’s theories can also be challenged empirically, for archaeology has already done enough to raise serious doubts about the central tenets of their thesis for significant parts of the northern fringe, and the burgeoning secondary literature on this matter reflects the changed state of affairs.21 However, archaeology alone cannot help us to understand the nature of social relationships within these communities in any detailed way. To do this, we need to return to the written sources, fragmentary and unsatisfactory as these are before 900, in order to say Rot., 14; Seb., 14. For a cautionary word on tribal societies see W. Davies, ‘Looking backwards to the early medieval past: Wales and England, a contrast in approaches’, Welsh History Review xxii (2004), 197–221. 21 Although culturally and socially more ‘Roman’ than Barbero and Vigil proposed, gradations of nuance and intensity varied from region to region throughout the empire, and it is likely that direct Roman political control and cultural influence in Cantabria were less intense than they were everywhere else in the peninsula with the exception of the Basque country. None the less, archaeology has conclusively proved that these regions did not remain completely outside of the sphere of Roman influence. For secondary literature see J. A. Quirós Castillo, A. Azkarate Garai-Olaun, R. Bohigas Roldán, I. García Camino, A. L. Palomino Lázaro and J. M. Tejado Sebastián, ‘Arqueología de la alta edad media en el Cantábrico oriental’, in A. Llanos Ortiz de Landaluze (ed.), Medio siglo de arqueología en el Cantábrico oriental y su entorno, Vitoria 2009, 449–500; R. Bohigas Roldán, Yacimientos arqueológicos en el sector central de la montaña cantábrica, Santander 1982; and A. Fuentes Domínguez, ‘La romanidad tardía en los territorios septentrionales de la península ibérica’, in C. Fernández Ochoa (ed.), Los finisterres atlánticos en la antigüedad, Madrid–Gijón1996, 213–22; More recently see J. A. Gutiérrez González, ‘Poderes locales y cultura material en el área ástur-cántabra (ss. vi–vii)’, in P. Senac (ed.), Histoire et archéologie des sociétés de la vallée de l’Ebre (VII–XI siècles), Toulouse 2009, 183–206. 19

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anything about Liébana society in the long period spanning the sixth to the ninth centuries. The historical footprint of Cantabrian society in Late Antiquity has been the subject of great debate, but it is beyond doubt that Cantabrians are only dimly visible in a handful of post-Roman sources.22 John of Biclar used the term ‘Cantabria’ to describe the area traversed by the Visigothic king Leovigild during a campaign of 574 in which the fortress of Amaya (Burgos) was taken, indicating that ‘Cantabria’ extended into the area that is now northern Castile, and indeed further into the Ebro valley.23 The reduction of Cantabria was also related in the seventh-century Vita Sancti Emiliani, and mentioned by Isidore of Seville, so we can infer that it was a major royal endeavour.24 Whether these campaigns responded to a Frankish incursion into Cantabria cannot be verified, but relations between the Visigoths and the Franks in the northern limits of the kingdom were both more frequent and denser than is often acknowledged and must imply that Cantabria was not totally marginal to wider political developments.25 It is altogether more striking that the VSE tells us that there was a Cantabrian senate (senatus) in the sixth century, most probably an assembly of local aristocrats who met to protect their landed interest and exercised some claim to social primacy in the region rather than a formally constituted body. Whatever the ethnic origin of these individuals (although, interestingly, some have Roman names, such as the senator Honorius), the existence of a body of local aristocrats to which the appellation of ‘senate’ could be applied implies that Roman aristocratic socio-cultural practice had left some imprint on the region.26 Seventh-century Cantabria is poorly documented; the mostly normative sources of the Visigoths cannot help us to understand social practice in the remote north of the kingdom. However, Leovigild’s efforts to subdue local Cantabrian political elites in the 570s and Sisebut’s punitive campaigns of the We cannot be sure about the precise extent of the area that was home to those people identified as Cantabrians in the post-Roman sources; however, at various times it seems to have extended beyond the modern autonomous region of Cantabria. See S. Castellanos García, ‘Aproximación a la historia política del alto valle del Ebro durante los siglos v–vi D.C’, Brocar xviii (1994), 119–38 at p. 127. For further discussions of the areas of modern Spain associated with Cantabria in the Middle Ages see J. González Echegaray, Cantabria en la transición al medievo: los siglos oscuros: IV–IX, Santander 1998, ch. iii. The same author’s Los Cántabros, Madrid 1966, is the best of the classic works on Cantabrian society. 23 ‘His diebus Leovegildus rex Cantabriam ingressus provinciae pervasores interfecit, Amaiam occupat’: IBC, a. 574, at p. 213 24 ‘Cantabrum namque iste obtinuit’: HG xlix, at p. 287; ‘Eodem igitur anno, quadragesimae diebus reuelatur ei etiam excidium Cantabriae’: VSE xxxiii, at p. 38. 25 This tradition derives from a cryptic reference in which it is claimed that in the sixth century a mysterious Frankish duke named Francio ruled in Cantabria: Fredegar, Chronicarum quae dicuntur Fredegarii Scholastici Libri IV cum continuationibus, ed. B. Krush, MGH, SRM ii, Hanover 1888, iv, at p. 133. 26 VSE xxxiii, at p. 38. 22

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Map 3.  The Liébana valley.

610s show that powerful Visigothic kings felt that Cantabria lay within their political orbit, and that they were prepared to resort to force to impose their hegemony in the face of resistance.27 This hegemony was doubtless secured by the consolidation of political ties with local elites, but the scarcity of seventhcentury evidence for areas other than Toledo and its hinterlands means that little can be said about the high-ranking figures who governed their regional territories in the royal name. Crucially, however, it is at least certain that a network of dukes and counts existed, thanks to the lists of titled figures – effectively officers of the crown – that appear in the records of Visigothic church councils.28 The Visigothic law code also makes it clear that counts were HG lxii, at p. 292. See, for example, Concilios visigóticos e hispanorromanos, ed. J. Vives, T. Marín Martínez and G. Martínez Díez, Barcelona 1963; Tol. VIII lists the counts palatine in 653; Tol. XIII does the same in 683. By far the best discussion of the duties of dukes and counts, as well as 27

28

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expected ‘to display appropriate zeal for public service’.29 Further anecdotal evidence of the existence of office-holding grandees is easy to find in the surviving source material: for example, Duke Claudius, military commander of Lusitania, survived a conspiracy in the 580s before going on to rout the Franks in Septimania at the end of the decade, and the mid seventh-century Duke Paul is well known for his revolt against King Wamba in the 670s.30 In the north of the peninsula, Fructuosus, who hailed from the Bierzo and held the office of metropolitan bishop of Braga in the middle of the seventh century, is said to have been the son of a duke of the Spanish army.31 Way to the east, the correspondence of Count Bulgar gives us some insight into the complicated business of diplomatic practice in the province of Narbonensis around the year 600.32 This is all consistent with the demonstrable ambition of the Visigothic kings from the 570s onwards, who looked to govern across the peninsula with the help of leading figures throughout the kingdom, even if these powerful men occasionally needed to be brought to heel. Taken together, the indications are that Visigothic kings after Leovigild looked to draw Cantabria further into the political structures of the kingdom. The events of 711, of course, fundamentally altered the political shape of Iberia, but if anything the political value and ideological potency of Cantabria seems to have increased in the eyes of the peninsula’s Christian kings, now restricted to a small part of the northern fringe of the peninsula. In this light it is not surprising that the ninth-century royal chronicles tell us that Alfonso i, the third ruler of the kingdom of Asturias, was the son of a certain Peter, duke of Cantabria.33 The historicity of this individual cannot be ascertained, but the chroniclers tell us that Alfonso ii was keen to restore the Gothic order in Oviedo, and it is significant that they clearly thought nothing of calling upon a Cantabrian aristocrat to bolster the glory of their royal line.34 Given that pedigree was vital to the status and legitimacy of medieval monarchs, it is that of all officers at the Visigothic court, remains that of P. D. King, Law and society in the Visigothic kingdom, Cambridge 1972, ch. iii; cf. A. Isla Frez, ‘El officium palatinum visigodo: entorno regio y poder aristocrático’, Hispania lxii (2002), 823–48. 29 LV ix. ii. ix. 30 For Duke Claudius see the ‘The Lives of the Fathers of Mérida’ (Vitas Patrum Emeritensium) in Lives of the Visigothic Fathers, ed. and trans. A. T. Fear, Liverpool 1997, 45–105 at p. 94; for Duke Paul see The story of Wamba: Julian of Toledo’s Historia Wambae regis, trans. J. M. Pizarro, Washington DC 2005, 187 and passim. 31 For Fructuosus’ origins see VSF [2] at p. 82. The translated Life of St Fructuosus of Braga is available in Lives of the Visigothic Fathers at pp. 123–44. 32 Miscellanea Wisigothica, ed. J. Gil, Seville 1992, epp. x–xvi. 33 ‘Infra pauci uero temporis spatium Adefonsus filius Petri Cantabrorum ducis ex regni prosapiem Asturias advenit’: Rot., 11; ‘Post Faffilani interitum Adefonsus successit in regnum, uir magne uirtutis filius Petri ducis, ex semine Leuuegildi et Reccaredi regum progenitus’: Seb., 13; ‘Adefonsus Pelagi gener rg. an xviii. Iste Petri Cantabrie ducis filius fuit’: Alb., xv, 3. 34 See the sceptical line taken in Escalona, ‘Family memories’, passim.

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unlikely that Cantabria would have been deemed a fitting place of origin for an Asturian king had this place been completely marginal to the politics of the sixth and seventh centuries. Thus, the indications are that landowning aristocrats in parts of Cantabria were not totally isolated from the wider political currents of Visigothic Spain, even if this area had never been proximate to the royal court. It is archaeology, however, that conclusively demonstrates that Cantabrian society underwent some degree of Romanisation and was subsequently subject to Visigothic influence. Romano-Visigothic aristocracies certainly inhabited the area and some physical evidence for their presence has now been uncovered in the shape of the aristocratic residential and productive complexes known as villae, some of which are not far from the Liébana.35 Late Roman villas represent only one form of aristocratic cultural expression; another was city life. Much emphasis has been placed on the notion that Cantabria and Asturias were superficially Romanised by stressing that they had few urban sites throughout the Roman and Visigothic period, a view extended to include much of the rest of the northern fringe of the peninsula. But this approach does not stand up to scrutiny: aside from the fact that Santander and Gijón are now accepted to have been Roman urban centres, it also reflects a methodological prejudice common to many archaeologists and historians who too readily ignore the extra-urban context.36 A much more profitable way of conceptualising Romanisation in the northern fringe of Spain is that proposed by Gutiérrez González: that is, as a particular form of a wider phenomenon, distinct from ‘Mediterranean’ or ‘Meseta’ Romanisation, perhaps best termed ‘northern’ or ‘Atlantic’ Romanisation (‘romanización septentrional’ or ‘Atlántica’).37 Materially, we should least expect to find evidence of classic Romano-Visigothic urban settlement in the mountainous zones given the difficulties that such geographical contexts entail for these settlements. Yet Gutiérrez González For the restoration of the Gothic order see Alb., xv, 9. The villa (here Roman aristocratic estate) of Santa María de Hito, in the valley of Valderredible in the south of Cantabria, was an elite residence occupied from the end of the third century until the beginnings of the fifth. From the sixth century until the eleventh, part of the buildings was re-used as a funerary space, showing continuity of exploitation of space. For details see A. Chavarría Arnau, El final de las villae en Hispania (siglos IV–VII D. C.), Turnhout 2007, 290. The Roman villa known as ‘El Conventón’ (Camesa-Rebolledo, Mataporquera) shows evidence of first- to third-century habitation, and later functional adaptation, in the form of tombs which have been dated to the sixth century. C14-dating has established eighth-century dates for further tombs found at this site, which point toward continued occupation of the area in the medieval period. A small early medieval church has been found at the site too: M. A. García Guinea, ‘Excavaciones en el yacimiento romano-medieval de Camesa-Rebolledo (Mataporquera)’, in R. Ontañón Peredo (ed.), Actuaciones arqueológicas en Cantabria, 1984–1999, Santander 2000, 45–8. 36 C. Fernández Ochoa, P. García Díaz and F. Gil Sendino, ‘La investigación sobre Gijón y su concejo en época romana: estado de la cuestión’, in C. Fernández Ochoa (ed.), Los finisterres atlánticos en la antigüedad, Madrid–Gijón 1996, 157–63. On Santander see J. L. Casado and J. González Echegaray, El puerto de Santander en la Cantabria romana, Santander 1995. 37 Gutiérrez González, ‘Poderes locales’, 184. 35

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has demonstrated that archaeologists now have at their disposal a significant and varied corpus of archaeological data from across the Asturias and parts of Cantabria which conclusively demonstrates that it is no longer credible to underestimate Roman influence in these areas.38 Indeed, Gutiérrez González has concluded that ‘the Cantabrian region appears clearly integrated in Roman and Visigothic political and socio-economic structures’, a position which has significant ramifications for much of the historiography.39 This re-evaluation of the levels of Romanisation in Cantabria and the Asturias has focussed on a variety of sites: the site at Rodiles, for example, in the ría de Villaviciosa in the Asturias, indicates Roman and Visigothic occupation, and may have undergone modification from a ‘villa a mare’ (coastal villa) to a militarised stronghold of a Visigothic-era cacique, operating with a degree of independence which can only be guessed at. Diverse objects of late-antique date, and a ‘Visigothic’ or ‘Germanic’ typology have been found all over the Asturias, notably at Valdediós, San Juan de Nieva and Alesga. Cantabria shows a slightly different expression of Roman and Visigothic cultural penetration, given that few villae have been found in its western and most northerly zones, but it none the less seems to have formed part of this wider cultural world. Funerary goods, described by Gutiérrez González as ‘objects of a Hispano-Gothic typology (lyriform belt clasps, tremisses, spoons, cooking pots and other liturgical pieces)’, have been found at many sites, including La Hermida, Cudón and Portillo de Arenal.40 These burials, possibly of regional aristocrats, may have been designed to reflect the high status of the individuals involved. Castro Urdiales and Santander also offer clear indications of Romano-Visigothic influence, what with late Roman and Visigothic ceramics having been found during excavation.41 Just to the west of Santander Visigothic brooches and ceramics have been located at a small settlement in Mortera too.42 Clearly, future archaeological excavation can only shed more light on this still rather obscure world; it is, none the less, a world which was considerably more ‘Roman’ than was once thought. It should be borne in mind, too, that the archaeological and written registers demonstrate that substantial Roman influence rubbed shoulders with the

Ibid. passim. ‘la región cantábrica se nos muestra claramente integrada en las estructuras políticas y socioeconómicas romanas y visigodas’: ibid. 183. 40 ‘objetos de adscripción hispanogoda (broches de cinturón liriformes, tremises, cucharillas, calderos y otras piezas litúrgicas)’: ibid. 193. 41 Information which has been helpfully compiled and analysed in J. Añíbarro Rodríguez, ‘El poblamiento de las aldeas costeras en el Cantábrico central durante la alta edad media: una perspectiva arqueológica’, in J. Quirós Castillo (ed.), The archaeology of early medieval villages in Europe, Vitoria–Gasteiz 2009, 191–201. 42 M. L. Serna Gancedo, A. Valle Gómez and J. A. Hierro Gárate, ‘Broches de cinturón hispanovisigodos y otros materiales tardoantiguos de la Cueva de las Penas (Mortera, Piélagos), Sautuola xi (2006), 247–76. 38 39

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mountainous zones of Cantabria. The northern Meseta, and, in particular, the Ebro valley, which in their most northerly zones probably included territory which then formed part of the lands of the Cantabrians, display this influence very clearly. The Visigothic period is now believed to have overseen a revival for certain smaller-scale urban settlements in eastern Cantabria and surrounding areas. Quirós Castillo and others have described a range of phenomena which have contributed notably to a reassessment of the quality and extent of Roman influence in these regions. In Contrebia Leucade, the fragmentation and reoccupation of dwelling places from the later imperial period has now been verified archaeologically; further east, Pamplona remained a dynamic centre throughout the early Middle Ages; similarly, fortifications such as that of Amaya may too have been revitalised by a more stable Visigothic presence in the region after Leovigild’s campaigns.43 Thus, when our fragments of evidence are considered together, the arguments for discarding the notion that Cantabria at the end of the eighth century (when the Liébana reappears in the documents) remained a ‘tribal’ society untouched by the social patterns of the Romano-Visigothic world are compelling. The post-Roman centuries in Cantabria, brought to light by the archaeological evidence and by the textual references to scheming senators and warring kings, are striking for the broadly similar features that they share with other areas of the peninsula at the same time. As in other parts of the former empire, a self-generating fusion of Roman and native came to the fore here, with pockets of heightened RomanoVisigothic influence. Uncovering the Liébana Let us now focus on the Liébana again. Although the body of material is relatively limited, the few archaeological interventions which have been undertaken in the Liébana have yielded suggestive, if provisional, results.44 The single biggest problem for an understanding of the Liébana concerns the accurate dating of archaeological material: sites such as the defensive fortification at Pico del Castillo, and the Cueva Santa, have been assigned dates spanning the long and unwieldy period from 500 to 1000.45 This sort of information is simply not accurate enough to be of great use to historians attempting to reconstruct Liébana society in the early Middle Ages. None the less, Cueva Santa is a particularly interesting site: here a small chapel and cell seem to have played host to a hermit, while decorative motifs similar to those at Ramiro i’s royal For which see Quirós Castillo and others, ‘Arqueología en el Cantábrico oriental’, 7. C. Díez Herrera, ‘La Liébana altomedieval: del espacio “escrito” al espacio interpretado’, in Liébana y letras, Santander 2008, 25–46. 45 R. Bohigas Roldán, ‘Proyecto de conservación de la ermita de Cueva Santa (Monasterio de Santo Toribio de Liébana, Camaleño, 1995–1996)’, in Ontañón Peredo, Actuaciones arqueológicas, 1984–1999, 261–2. 43

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palace at Naranco, on the foothills outside Oviedo, suggest a certain Asturian influence, making it probable that this hermitage was occupied in the eighth or ninth centuries. This too may suggest that channels of artistic influence, and perhaps patronage, existed among elite groups across the northern peninsula. A series of excavations at several other Liébana churches has yielded inconclusive results.46 However, these same projects were responsible for the excavation of early medieval structures at Collado de Pelea in Colio, where a settlement and walled zone was found, and the discovery of a ‘very old early medieval defensive structure’ at Bolera de los Moros in Piñeres. At this latter site, Van den Eynde Ceruti has claimed that one of the best sets of ‘ceramics from the period of repopulation in Cantabria’ has been recovered.47 The strategic value of the location of this site, which is formed by many elements, including a central patio and an atalaya (watch-tower), is most suggestive. It is situated at an altitude of 750 metres on the Monte de Santa Catalina, in the northern extremities of the Liébana; from this position, a north-south route which runs through the region and connects the Meseta with the Cantabrian Sea was presumably rendered more secure at its northern end.48 Analysis of the excavated area, and of the ceramics found at the site, has led Sarabia Regina to suggest a date of construction around the middle of the eighth century, although this has been contested; to what extent a venture of this scale might have been local or ‘central’ in origins is impossible to say, but its scale is without doubt impressive.49 Excavations at Santa María de Piasca, a monastery whose existence is documented from 930, have yet to shed light on the early medieval structures but further late antique and early medieval fortification has undergone excavation elsewhere.50 This has revealed a relatively large number of small-scale early medieval fortifications in the Liébana.51 Concrete dates

E. Van den Eynde Ceruti, ‘Plan general de investigación de la arquitectura monástica altomedieval: prospecciones arqueológicas en los yacimientos de los monasterios altomedievales de Osina, Aguas Cálidas, Cosgaya y Naranco’, in Ontañón Peredo, Actuaciones arqueológicas, 1984–1999, 87–8. 47 For the discovery of the ‘estructura defensiva altomedieval muy arcaica’, as well as ‘uno de los mejores lotes de cerámica de Repoblación de Cantabria’ see ibid. 88. 48 P. M. Sarabia Regina, ‘Excavaciones en la fortaleza medieval de la Bolera de los Moros (Piñeres, Peñarrubia): Campaña de 1999’, in R. Ontañón Peredo (ed.), Actuaciones arqueológicas en Cantabria, 1987–1999, Santander 2002, 269–75 at p. 269. 49 Ibid. 274; cf. J. Marcos Martínez and L. Mantecón Callejo, ‘Aproximación a las fortificaciones de cronología altomedieval en Cantabria’, in J. A. Quirós Castillo and J. M. Tejado Sebastián (eds), Los castillos altomedievales en el noroeste de la península ibérica, Bilbao 2012, 99–122 at p. 111. 50 R. Bohigas Roldán, E. Campuzano Ruiz and J. González Echegaray, ‘La intervención arqueológica en Santa María la Real de Piasca (Cabezón de Liébana) (2000–2002)’, in R. Ontañón Peredo (ed.), Actuaciones arqueológicas en Cantabria, 2000–2003, Santander 2008, 179–84. 51 Some of these are discussed in Marcos Martínez and Mantecón Callejo, ‘Aproximación’, 111–13. 46

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are lacking, but features of construction point to Astur-Leonese origins for at least some of these fortifications, and it has been suggested that they served as nodal points in networks of lordship.52 The overall picture, even from these relatively few sites, is of a region which was partially Christianised and home to monumentally significant churches and defensive structures. These developments are not always reflected in the secondary literature.53 Yet it is clear that Roman-style landholding practices are also visible from the early ninth century in the Liébana, which is more or less when land transactions begin to appear (in number) in charter documentation across the whole of non-Muslim Spain. These Roman-style practices (diverse levels of legal, social and economic autonomy, evidenced by a social formation composed of smallscale allodialists to local aristocrats) are unlikely to have been newly introduced just before the survival of documents starts to gain a foothold in the Liébana, as some documents make reference to inherited land which stretches back to the eighth century.54 Christianity was probably quite well established by the seventh century in Cantabria although it is to be hoped that future archaeological work can help to fill in some of the considerable gaps in our knowledge in this respect. Loring García has made a plausible case for accepting that Christianity gained considerable impetus from the last quarter of the sixth century, once Leovigild’s campaigns had brought the Cantabrian region back under Visigothic hegemony.55 This contention is strengthened by the VSE, which makes it clear that Cantabrians bore witness to and participated in the pastoral work of St Emilian (known as San Millán in Spanish) in the Ebro valley, which speaks of missionary activity in the northern peninsula.56 The material register also offers clues: sixth- and seventh-century dates have been assigned to bronze objects of liturgical use found in various contexts throughout Cantabria.57 Amongst these Christian sites, the so-called cave churches (‘iglesias rupestres’) are perhaps the most direct indicators of the existence of Christian practice

J. Marcos Martínez and L. Mantecón Callejo, ‘El castillo del monte Subiedes (Camaleño, Liébana, Cantabria)’, TSP iv (2009), 95–129 at pp.113–27. 53 ‘se puede deducir que la población indígena era una sociedad de carácter tribal, de base gentilicia, con una escasa especialización del espacio, colectivo, en el que se practica una agricultura nómada unida al pastoreo’: M. E. Álvarez Llopis, ‘Introducción a la Liébana medieval’, in M. Estrada Sánchez and M. Sánchez, La Liébana: una aproximación histórica, Santander 1996, 78–92 at p. 82. 54 For example, T3 (826) shows Froila donate to abbot Lavi ‘de omne mea hereditate quidquid uisus sum abere de parentum meorum’. 55 Historians have argued for or against the presence of Christian communities in Cantabria, mostly on the basis of divergent readings of enigmatic inscriptions on steles (commemorative stone slabs): M. I. Loring García, Cantabria en la alta edad media: organización eclesiástica y relaciones sociales, Madrid 1988, 93–105. 56 VSE, passim. 57 Loring García, Cantabria, 118–25. 52

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in Cantabria between 500 and 700.58 The Cueva Santa is also testament to currents of Christianity in the Liébana itself, and Roger Collins has provided a plausible context for the spread of Christianity throughout the peninsula in these centuries.59 Collins has convincingly demonstrated too that the seventhcentury Visigothic Church was both intellectually outstanding and zealous in its support of the implantation of Catholic infrastructure, and such a picture tallies with the church-building activity common to Visigothic aristocrats throughout the peninsula.60 More telling is the appearance of apparently stable Christian communities of various sorts in the Liébana, documented from the very earliest charters. We therefore possess, on the one hand, textual and archaeological indications of the growing reach of Christianity in the sixth- and seventh-century Liébana, and, on the other hand, firm evidence of Christian practice from 790 (the first Santo Toribio charter) onwards.61 There is also the perspective offered from the world of letters to bear in mind, for should the Liébana have genuinely remained impervious to the Christian religion, or to Romano-Visigothic cultural currents more generally, it seems unlikely that Beatus would have been able to correspond with Alcuin of York in Francia, as he did, or to pen tracts contingent on his awareness of contemporary theological debates. The community and the individual The earliest written documents from the Liébana present us with a late eighthand early ninth-century landscape which was home to numerous churches and monasteries.62 One form of monastic foundation in Spain has been the subject of a great deal of attention.63 This is the form enshrined in the monastic pact, a specific sort of foundational document in which the actions of the participants in the pact were expressly bound by a series of regulations set out therein. These rules were variations on a model form, and constituted a bilateral agreement between an abbot and a community of monastic followers. The community Echegaray, Cantabria en la transición, 67. R. Collins, Early medieval Spain: unity in diversity, 400–1000, London 1983, 106–7. 60 On the brilliance of the Spanish Church see ibid. ch. iii. For an example of aristocratic church-building in an area of northern Spain also marginal to the Visigothic court see the activity of Ricimer, described in Valerio of the Bierzo’s Ordo Querimoniae, v, 80–5, in Valerio of Bierzo, an ascetic of the late Visigothic period, ed. C. Aherne, Washington DC 1949. 61 T1 (790). 62 J. Montenegro Valentín discusses documented Liébana monasteries in some detail: Santa María de Piasca: estudio de un territorio a través de un centro monástico (857–1252), Valladolid 1993, 22–8. 63 S. Wood, The proprietary church in the medieval West, Oxford 2006, ch. vi. The classic statement remains C. J. Bishko, ‘The pactual tradition in Hispanic monasticism’, and ‘Gallegan pactual monasticism in the repopulation of Castile’, in his Spanish and Portuguese monastic history, London 1984, 1–43, 513–31. 58 59

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agreed to recognise the abbot’s authority, and its members acknowledged the transfer of their worldly goods to the new community whose foundation they commemorated in the pact; it was also stipulated in the pact that should any party contravene the regulations which governed the newly founded community, he or she would face the penalty of expulsion. It is the element of mutuality that characterised the pact. The origins of the monastic pact are most likely to be found in an adaptation of a model formula given in the Regula Monastica Communis, or Common Rule, of c. 650, ascribed to Fructuosus, abbot-bishop of Braga-Dumio.64 Fructuosus was a tireless reformer, as the Vita Sancti Fructuosi tells us, and apparently went to great lengths to counteract what he considered to be the inappropriate foundation of ‘private’ or ‘family’ monasteries, and to police improper religious observance more generally.65 In particular, he wished to ensure that familyrun monasteries should not escape the watchful eye of the church hierarchy, lest they fall prey to superstition and unorthodox practice. This spiritual zeal was exalted in his Vita, but, beyond the basic hagiographical tropes, it is clear that Fructuosus’ influence was just as significant with regard to the course taken by Spanish monasticism in the early Middle Ages as it was on spiritual regeneration. Charles Bishko’s pioneering studies of the mid-twentieth century made a convincing case for the Galician origins of the monastic pact.66 He showed that the success of ‘pactual monasticism’ was built on the creation of a federation of monasteries (the Sancta Communis Regula), most of which were based around Braga and the Bierzo and each of which was governed by the strictures laid down in the Regula Monastica Communis. Regular synods brought together the abbots and, theoretically, ensured proper practice and a degree of uniformity. How it came to be that the monastic pact of the Iberian north-west was successfully implanted in the Liébana remains unknown, but it may simply be the case that earnest holy men took the pactual tradition eastwards on their travels.67 Certainly there are no grounds to believe that it was ever a directed policy, implemented by ecclesiastical authorities; indeed, the fact that the pactual tradition seems to have been successfully implanted in Galicia, the Liébana, the

64 Iberian Fathers, II: Braulio of Saragossa, Fructuosus of Braga, Washington, DC 1969, trans C. Barlow, 176–206. 65 For examples see VSF [3–8] at pp. 83–92. 66 The existence of such a strikingly original and singular monastic practice in late antique north-western Spain has been greeted with scepticism by certain branches of the historiography. As Bishko recounts, J. Pérez de Urbel argued that Bishko’s contention regarding the Galician origins of the pact, in spite of the clear links between its origins and the circle of Fructuosus, was a misreading of the evidence. For Pérez de Urbel, the monastic pact was a Galician adaptation of earlier, Visigothic, monastic practice, a point which Bishko convincingly argues against in ‘The pactual tradition’, 6–16. 67 Ibid. 5.

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Rioja and Castile, in marked contrast to most of the Astur-Leonese heartlands, suggests that it enjoyed little ‘central’ support of any sort.68 However, the wider significance of the monastic pact in local societies of the early Middle Ages has given rise to considerable discussion. Loring García has argued that the monastic pact allows us to see the emergence of new forms of social relationship. These new forms undermined the more ancient tribal structures that had obtained in the Liébana hitherto; it so follows that relationships based on communal activity, characteristic of egalitarian tribal social structures, gave way to private lordly influence and sharpened social hierarchies.69 Understood in this way, Liébana society underwent a process of more or less straightforward ‘feudalisation’, in the Marxist conception of the term, with its distinguishing forms of social organisation, such as commendation, becoming defining elements of the Liébana’s social logic before the tenth century.70 But this conception, regardless of its applicability elsewhere, rests in its Cantabrian context on accepting that tribal society reached the year 800 in vigorous health, which is very difficult to sustain in light of the cumulative information provided by archaeology. However, given that the oldest surviving document from the cartulary of Santo Toribio is a monastic pact, it is at least possible to test the textual basis of these contentions too. The document with which this chapter opened, T1, dated to 790, seems to honour the foundation of a monastery by six men (amongst whom a certain Álvaro is singled out) and twelve women, who renounced their worldly possessions in order to pursue the monastic life. As far as can be told, the basic aspects delineated in the text are as follows. Álvaro and his brothers and sisters, inhabitants of Aquas Calidas (modern day Las Caldas, more than 10 km north of Potes), gave up all of their goods to the Church and an abbot named Albarone. They agreed to stay henceforth in the monastery (which is unspecified, but almost certainly the one whose foundation the text is recording) and the charter also makes it plain that the details of the pact inhibited freedom of movement to the extent that each individual member could not leave unless the community decided to allow it.71 The authority of the abbot was clearly recognised (‘abbati nostro domno Albarone’), while the pact seems to have applied to anyone who joined the monastic community from the point of the

On the geographical spread of the monastic pact see idem, ‘Gallegan pactual monasticism’, 1. 69 ‘tenía como consecuencia el separar al individuo o individuos de su parentela e integrarlos en un nuevo grupo constituido por el patrono y sus encomendados’: Loring García, Cantabria, 440. 70 ‘En conjunto el contenido del pacto se corresponde con el de una encomendación, en la que existe una entrega de bienes materiales a un patron, en este caso el abad y la iglesia, y a su vez el reconocimiento de una dependencia con respecto al mismo’: ibid. 256. 71 ‘Quod factus et pactus firmiter teneatur et qui volverit ingredere in monasterio, tam pro culpa quam ecciam et pro melioracione anime et corporis, non abeat aliut potestatem nisi quod illi comunis collacio dederit’: T1 (790). 68

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realisation of the pact onwards, and to have regulated how and under what circumstances monastic life could be abandoned. Albarone’s seniority is implied by the description of him as ‘our lord’ (‘nostro domno’), indicating that the community recognised distinctions of hierarchy and was itself subject to internal divisions of some sort or other. Álvaro too may have enjoyed some sort of authority over his colleagues (‘Ego Aluaro, una cum fratribus meis’) given that he seems to have overseen the drawing up of the foundation document; moreover, of the six males named as participants, two are given the title ‘presbiter’, meaning that their status differed in some respects to that of their colleagues. This, clearly, was not a community of equals even at the moment when the pact was drawn up, which makes it hard to imagine how pactual monasticism can be viewed as a catalyst of the sort of social changes that some historians believe that the pact implies. Admittedly, the way in which the document lists the participants in the body of the text hints at a small initial community (perhaps the inhabitants of a village, or a group of relatives, all separately property-owning) whose members were, in theory, closely tied to the conditions laid out in the text. But this in itself does not imply that those singled out were simply subject to the whims of Albarone, Álvaro and the named priests. In fact, as Díaz Martínez has implied, Loring García mischaracterises the monastic pact by overlooking the extraordinary powers that the members of the community enjoyed as individuals – powers which allowed each of them to convene meetings of the whole group with the objective of correcting abbatial abuses. Regulations of any sort are not normally a reliable guide to social practice, and these may have been emphasised in the pact so as to lend a formal quality to the foundation and to be of use in the context of dispute settlement, but they theoretically conferred significant powers upon the monastic community, which were aimed, moreover, at preserving the agreed set of rules.72 Thus, hierarchy and regulation characterised this new community, as they do most human collectives, but the pact does not imply the emergence of feudal social relationships of dependence; these rules simply lent order and structure to a life given over to reflection and cooperation. The naming of the individuals involved merely recognises the creation of a personal bond between the abbot and the members of his community. The social relationship enshrined in the pact is indeed interesting because of the measures it concedes to ordinary brothers and sisters, whose donations, and willingness to adhere to the rules, were most probably

‘ut potestatem non habeat unus ex is quod super nominavit aliut nisi quod a moiori acceperit ipsut’: T1 (790). ‘To call upon a meeting of the entire community, on the initiative of the rank and file of the monks and in cases when the authority of the abbot was called into question, was not common in monastic rules, which usually upheld the principle of obedience and the disciplinary superiority of the abbot or his representatives’: P. C. Díaz Martínez, ‘Monasteries in a peripheral area: seventh-century Gallaecia’, in M. de Jong, F. Theuws and C. van Rhijn (eds), Topographies of power in the early Middle Ages, Leiden 2001, 329–59 at p. 343. 72

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the bedrock of the pact’s success. Wood has characterised the basis of the pact as a ‘community of goods’; these goods belonged to the individual participants of the agreement, as the pact records, who then grouped their possessions for the benefit of the community.73 Private affluence and pre-existing hierarchy therefore created the conditions for communal benevolence and cooperation, vouchsafed by the authority of an abbot. Should these social conditions not have existed the pact could not have taken the form it did. Social power need not always be resented by the wider community when concentrated in the hands of individuals, and the power enjoyed by Albarone seems to have been a power entrusted to him by those participating in the pact. At the same time, we need to be clear about the manifestations of power: this was no community of equals, but the charter none the less does not suggest that Albarone’s power was that of a lord over his dependants, since the pact seems to have allowed for mechanisms by which unscrupulous abuse could be checked. Another example from the cartulary reinforces this point: Valeriano and his father Teodario described their donation to San Salvador de Villeña in 829 as a ‘pactum’, but the phrase ‘abrenunciamus nos et omnes facultates nostras’ is by no means conclusive proof of the forced concession of personal autonomy.74 It actually seems to suggest that entry into the community necessitated the donation of the personal belongings of all who joined the community, a feature common to all monastic rules; these would become the basis of the community’s sustenance. Relationships such as that enshrined in the monastic pact demanded that all parties make sacrifices in order to realise the security that they sought in the pactual community. Rather than attempting to introduce what we now call ‘feudal’ relationships of dependence into the monastic sphere, pacts were a response to a completely different set of social forces. They were designed to engender an element of stability and order by means of establishing a basic and fairly ‘flat’ social hierarchy, without personal or collective autonomy being ceded in any totalising way. To be properly understood, the pact needs to be placed much more closely within the context of northern Spanish monastic foundation whence it derived, and not the metanarrative of the steady genesis of feudal social structures. Pactual agreements make more sense in this revised context, for it is highly plausible that a community should be subject to internal divisions which none the less allowed for collaboration between villagers or family members. It is equally plausible to ask very different questions of the pact. For example, why should we not propose that those named in the pact also benefitted in some sense from the formation of this new community? Might they have gained a stable and steady share of the community’s produce, benefitted from its influence as a focal point of the local community (even if small-scale), and possibly also from the weight of local authority enjoyed by its abbot? More Wood, Proprietary church, 148. T6 (829).

73 74

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simply, might we not contemplate that a pact describes the entry of a series of individuals into the patronage network of an abbot? All social interaction in the early Middle Ages does not by definition have to be commendation or exploitation, and it is important to be aware of the variety of relationships that are documented in the eighth and ninth centuries. In this particular case, cooperation seems to have been just as important. Indeed, it is striking, given the probable influence of Fructuosus in the development of the monastic pact, that T1 portrays a monastic community seemingly not too far removed from the ‘house community’ that he so detested. In summary, some of the inhabitants of the late eighth-century Liébana seem to have sought stability and order in a form of regulated cooperation. The pact shows, none the less, that private landholding existed in this region before documents become plentiful, and that individuals were also able to arrive at ingenious solutions for managing their communities; neither tribal nor feudal, this was a society that deserves to be analysed on its own terms. The glimpses we have of this society, in fact, indicate that communities were shaped in crucial ways by aspects of the Latin Visigothic culture and society common to much of the peninsula. What this meant for longer-term social development in better documented centuries will be shown in the following chapters.

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Local Society in the Ninth Century As the ninth century dawns, the Liébana loses much of its earlier mystery and emerges with greater clarity in the source material. Small rural communities come to light, in which peasant farmers worked, prayed and engaged in transactions with their neighbours, buying here and selling there; indeed, while donation was important – and has been afforded a central role in the secondary literature – the indications are that this was no mere ‘gift economy’.1 The reciprocity of the gift was not the only form of instigating or consolidating social relationships, for the concept and practice of sale was rooted in Liébana society, and property and other goods changed hands for myriad reasons in a variety of contexts well before 900. A good example of sale is provided by a transaction dated to 15 April 868, when Petrus and Leudesinda, their children Erugio and Emiliana, and a certain Egeredus sold a vineyard in Grandovelia to the monastery of San Salvador de Villeña.2 This group seems to have consisted of a nuclear family and perhaps a more distant relative, a friend, or simply a neighbour.3 Three of the group stated what they accepted for their part in the sale, each receiving various quantities of meat, wine, barley and animals.4 The document was brought to Gift theory, and in particular the idea of reciprocity, has been central to most early medievalists’ conception of the social and economic structures of much of Europe from the post-Roman period to the eleventh or twelfth centuries, especially since Marcel Mauss’s work began to attract wide attention in the middle of the twentieth century. Put in very simple terms, this holds that gifts encourage countergifts, the aim being to cement social relationships; crucially, it has often been held that the ‘gift economy’ is incompatible with ‘market economies’ characterised by sale, credit, the profit motive, etc. See M. Mauss, ‘Essai sur le don: forme et raison de l’échange dans les societies archaïques’, L’Année sociologique i (1923–24), 30–186. Stimulating recent contributions include F. Curta, ‘Merovingian and Carolingian gift-giving’, Speculum lxxxi (2006), 671–99, and W. Davies and P. Fouracre (eds), The languages of gift in the early Middle Ages, Cambridge 2010. Both deny such incompatibility. 2 T11. Sánchez Belda located Grandovelia in Turieno, in the Valdebaró, in Santo Toribio, 491. 3 ‘Ego Petrus et ego Leudesinda, una cum filiis suis Erugio et Emiliana, et ego Egeredus placuit nobis’: T11. 4 ‘Pro ut conuenimus accepi ego Petrus a uobis in quantum valuit mea porcio in ipsa vinea carne, uino et ceuaria in tremise; et ego in Leudesinda dedi uobis ipsa mea porcione in ipsa vinea, preciata in tremise et uos mihi dedistis precium carnarium et ceuaria in termise [sic]; et ego Egeredus sic uendo uobis mea porcione in ipsa vinea, preciata in quator modios, sed uos mihi dedistis precium animalium in cuatuor modios, quod mihi et uobis bene et de ipso precio placuit, apud uos non remansit, ut ex hodierno die et tempore habeatis illut perpetuum abiturum’: T11. 1

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a close (as are the majority of transactions of this sort) with a warning clause, admonishing future wrongdoers who would contravene the agreement; it then made reference in its dating clause to the ruling monarch, Alfonso iii, before listing those who witnessed or confirmed the document. This template is typical of ninth- and tenth-century charters from northern Spain and includes many of the basic elements of structure and content of the majority of sales (or indeed donations).5 It does, none the less, provide us with a useful window onto certain aspects of Liébana society in the ninth century, telling us, for example, that ordinary people could deal with ecclesiastical institutions; that they could freely sell parts of their own property; and that this property could be jointly owned with persons not explicitly associated with the nuclear family. Moreover, it tells us that small-scale proprietors could make these sales alongside other parties, or on behalf of their families, in exchange for a price.6 San Salvador, the purchasing party in this transaction, was a major local monastery in the ninth-century Liébana and its origins can be traced back to at least the eighth century.7 It is, in fact, one of many churches and monasteries documented in the Santo Toribio charters before the year 1000.8 Although overshadowed by the monastery of Santo Toribio (at this stage still known as San Martín de Turieno) in the historiography, San Salvador seems to have attracted the donation of local inhabitants, and occasionally bought from them, with some success throughout much of the ninth century. For example, in 827, Aurelio and the brothers of Santa María de Cosgaya sold to Abbot Moisés and the monks of San Salvador four plots of land close to the monastery.9 Just a couple of years later, in 829, Valeriano, with his father Teodario and members of their community, transferred the monastery at Osina and all of its belongings and landed wealth to San Salvador.10 Whatever the size of the monastery at Osina (which may not have been large), San Salvador was clearly influential enough to incorporate another ecclesiastical institution, which indicates a period of expansion and concomitant social and economic prestige. Davies, Acts of giving, ch. v. ‘quod mihi et uobis bene et de ipso precio placuit’. 7 In T2 (796), Pruello, with his fellow holy brothers and sisters, sold to the monks of San Salvador an inherited plot of land in Villeña itself, close to the settlement of Cosgaya in Valdebaró. See J. Montenegro Valentín, Santa María de Piasca: estudio de un territorio a través de un centro monástico (857–1252), Valladolid 1993, 22–3. 8 Montenegro Valentín has recorded eleven churches or monasteries (the difference is not always made clear in the charters) in the Liébana before 1000 (not including San Martín de Turieno or Santa María de Piasca): Santa María de Piasca: estudio de un territorio, 22–8. Of these, San Esteban de Mieses (T3: 826), San Pedro de Viñón (T5: 828), San Salvador de Osina (T6: 829), Santa María de Baró (T7: 831) and San Adrián y Santa Natalia de Sionda (T17: 885), were all documented for the first time in the ninth-century charters from Santo Toribio. 9 T4. 10 T6. 5 6

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In addition, other clues also point to San Salvador’s importance. For example, it was the direct beneficiary of donation or exchange, or was the purchasing party, in at least nine of fifteen ninth-century Santo Toribio documents.11 Admittedly, this documentary spread is not large, but it probably indicates that San Salvador was among the richer monasteries of the Valdebaró (and possibly the entire Liébana) throughout the ninth century. At any rate, two facts are certain: first, that comparable holdings for no other Liébana monasteries have survived in the documentary record from this early date; second, and rather more important, that by the ninth century documents were at least sporadically being written and kept.12 With this in mind, the ninthcentury documents which record San Salvador’s purchases, and its receipt of donations, probably owe their creation and preservation to the needs of the keepers of the monastery’s archive, later incorporated into that of Santo Toribio. Change appears to have been afoot: ambitious institutions were expanding their horizons in the ninth century, and producing and retaining the title deeds which prove as much. The transaction of 829 involved the acquisition of a monastery situated well to the north of San Salvador, and contact between the two monasteries supposed crossing some thirty kilometres of mountainous terrain, which demonstrates that San Salvador was by the 820s prepared to engage in deals with institutions based outside the Valdebaró, where many of its documented landed holdings lay.13 But on what sort of relationship with the local community was this prominence built and why did it falter in the tenth century? Framing community in farming communities The previous chapter established that, for historians persuaded by the ideas of Barbero and Vigil, the eighth to eleventh centuries saw socially dominant

11 The donations to San Salvador are T6 (829); T8 (843); T9 (847); T10 (852); and T12 (873). The sales made to San Salvador by other parties are T4 (827); T11 (868); T15 (884). T16 (884) is an exchange of assets between the monastery and local peasants. T2 (796) may also record a transaction involving San Salvador, since monks from Villeña are depicted as the purchasing party in a small-scale transaction. However, it is not made expressly clear that these monks were part of the monastic community of San Salvador. Should T2 be accepted, then ten of seventeen pre-tenth-century charters involved San Salvador. 12 When reflecting on the embeddedness of charter writing in the early medieval Liébana it is interesting to note that there is some evidence that trained scribes whose job it was to write charters lived in the valley as early as the mid-ninth century; the earliest three Piasca charters, all originals, were written or redacted by the same scribe, a certain Ermoigius: P1 (857); P2 (861); P3 (861). The same standard abbreviations are used in these documents, which possibly indicates that the writer was writing in a long established tradition. 13 I have traced landed holdings situated in Valdebaró that were donated to, sold to, or exchanged with San Salvador, in T4 (827); T8 (843); T9 (847); T10 (852); T12 (873); T15 (884); and T16 (884).

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groups come to exercise local influence of an order that effectively obliged less solvent members of society to enter into dependence upon them; these weaker elements, these same historians argue, were no longer protected by the umbrella of community ethos and collective action which hitherto characterised Liébana society.14 These claims will be examined in this chapter, which will focus on the relations that bound or divided the inhabitants of the village world, in an attempt to characterise ninth-century Liébana society as fully as possible. In the following chapter social relations in the tenth-century Liébana will undergo examination, and in the final chapter of part i the nature and efficacy of public structures in the valley will be called into question. Throughout, it will become clear that, although isolated examples from the ninth- and tenth-century Liébana documentation make relationships of sharp degrees of dependence explicit, these remain very much the exception rather than the rule, and more consistently striking aspects of village life were the autonomy and ingenuity of a significant part of the peasant community. It is equally striking that social elites in this region emerged from within the village world in the tenth century, rather than from an already established and documented landed aristocracy with links to public structures; these links, insofar as they can be discerned, were in fact never to crystallise in this remote region in quite the same way that they did elsewhere in Christian Spain. Social and political power in the Liébana had its own character, for elites seem to have exerted what was, in comparison with much of Europe, remarkably little social pressure on the villagers of these small worlds throughout the ninth and tenth centuries, and even beyond. What can be said about these small worlds is of course conditioned by the surviving material, which really takes off after 900. Yet although the corpus of documents is small before 900, the outlines of social relations in the ninth century can still be traced. Of the fifteen Santo Toribio documents which date to the ninth century, three record straightforward sales, and nine, donations of varying sizes and sorts.15 These twelve documents are augmented by one exchange of property (framed as such, and not as a sale, in the charter), one dispute, and one document of profiliatio (quasi-adoption). Four ninth-century charters survive from the monastery of Santa María de Piasca, all on singlesheets, and these four also paint a broadly similar picture of Liébana society to that which is encountered in the Santo Toribio documents, describing smallscale transactions between members of village society.16 The four Piasca charters are significant, however, because not a single one records the involvement of a monastic institution in the transaction; instead they all describe sales between lay members of village society. In other words, these four charters show that Loring García, Cantabria, ch. vi. The sales are T4 (827); T11 (868); and T15 (884). The donations are T3 (826); T5 (828); T6 (829); T7 (831); T8 (843); T9 (847); T10 (852); T12 (873); and T13 (875). The exchange is T16 (884); the dispute T17 (885); and the ‘profiliatio’ T14 (875). 16 The four are P1 (857); P2 (861); P3 (861); and P4 (869). 14

15

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sale was part and parcel of village life in the ninth century, and that the mechanisms necessary to facilitate and record it were already in place. The charters also make it plain that those participating in these transactions were mostly allodialists: they owned their own land and lived off its produce, on the basis of which they chose to sell or donate part or all of their holdings to others. As settled cultivators, some no doubt cultivating for subsistence, others – still involved in the labour process – owning and cultivating on a greater scale, their private holdings were their primary concern. These private holdings changed hands, grew or shrank because individuals and families dabbled in transaction. Indeed, peasant-level wheeling and dealing clearly had a role to play in the transfer of both landed resources and movable goods, such as the goat and wine (‘kabra et bino’) that Argilo and her husband accepted from Ermulfo and his wife Alabera in exchange for land close to their house in Artinaba (‘terra que dititur Artinaba subtus domum meam’) and their portion in some pastureland (‘mea portione in ipso Prato Felitis’).17 The formal constraints of contract were also taken seriously by peasants. Ratified before witnesses (‘et coram testibus tradimus roborata’) and in the presence of the priest Cuendas, Argilo’s transaction suggests a world characterised by village-level dealing in property and goods. It also demonstrates an awareness among modest members of society of the utility of written title. Tellingly, these documents show that the contours of village society were not defined by tribal or communitarian social relations; land was held privately and lay in the hands of individuals and their families. The gift economy, exemplified by donation, here functioned alongside other imperatives in what was an economically and socially more complex society than has often been argued. Land and its use The seasonal tasks that befell medieval peasants are vividly captured in an agricultural calendar that adorns the walls of the twelfth-century pantheon of the Leonese kings at the Basilica of San Isidoro in León. These murals, although dating from a slightly later period, attest to the significance of land and the importance of its careful management in early medieval Europe. Land, indeed, was the major resource in ninth-century Europe, and in the Liébana it was bought, sold and given away, in parcels of varying extension, at all levels of society. Parcels of land were put to use in various ways. For example, in 826, a man called Froila gave all that he possessed in Lebeña and Vesarbado to Lavi, abbot of the church of San Esteban de Mieses; this involved an unspecified amount of land which had clearly belonged to his family for some time, and included various other assets.18 Froila framed his donation in the context of P4 (869). Similar deals are described in P1 (857); P2 (861); and P3 (861). ‘omne mea hereditate quidquid uisus sum abere de parentum meorum … terras, uineas,

17

18

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his personal inheritance, fully in the style of Romano-Visigothic practice; these were his private assets, and were clearly in no way communal, or collectively owned.19 Amongst these assets were vineyards and orchards, common features of the ninth-century landscape, cropping up frequently in early medieval charters from across the northern part of the peninsula, albeit in greater numbers in Cantabria and Galicia. Typical of this sort of transaction is the exchange of vineyards that took place between the brothers Gratus and Egila (‘nos germani qui sumus Gratus et Egila’), and the monks of San Salvador de Villeña in 884; or the ‘land, vineyards [and] orchards’ included in the transfer of the monastery at Osina to San Salvador de Villeña in 829.20 It was land and its produce, therefore, that bound this society together, and the transfer of rights over the control and ownership of land helped to shape all aspects of social development. Always in the peripheral vision of those who laboured on this land were the mountains, but they too could be put to use. Primarily they were used for grazing animals, which appear abundantly in the documentation, demonstrating that the ninth-century Liébana was characterised by a mixed-farming economy. References to the mountains, and to meadows presumably used for hay cropping, can also be found in ninth-century documents, and it is here in the higher areas used for the collection of wood, if anywhere, that common rights of access would have existed.21 The built environment, although small in scale, was not restricted to the dwelling places of the villagers, nor to the monasteries and churches with which they dealt from at least the ninth century, but also included buildings necessary for the production and storage of important staples; hence the appearance of houses, storehouses and mills in the documents.22 On occasion, more precise plots of land were described in land transactions (although we are never given dimensions), and these could be subdivisions of fields and orchards, bringing to mind an image of a ‘patchwork’ countryside consisting of plots of varying extension.23 Parcels of land could be pomiferas’. Note that San Esteban de Mieses is called a church in the document (‘ecclesie Sancte Stephani in locum Mesa ynaet [sic]’), although the title of monastery has been preferred by Montenegro Valentin: Santa María de Piasca: estudio de un territorio, 27. 19 Discussing landowning patterns in northern Spain, Chris Wickham has stated that ‘there is very little sign in Asturian documentation of anything other than Roman traditions of landowning; at most, there is reference to the standard forms of collective silvo-pastoral exploitation that can be found in any mountain area’ : Framing the early Middle Ages, 227–32 at p. 227. 20 T16 and T6 respectively. 21 For utilisation of mountains, meadows and for mixed farming see T9 (847), which lists Sempronio’s donation of the following assets in Mus; ‘baca, boue, res, promiferas uasa, ferramenta, prata, montes et fontes’. See also P4 (869), ‘in alio loco mea portione in ipso prato Felitis’. 22 T14 (875). 23 Parcels of land were also given other names, particularly when subdivided into smaller units: ‘nostras porciones quem abuimus’: T16 (884); ‘in Siondeuelia mea racione’: T12 (873). Uncultivated land was sometimes distinguished in the documents from that which

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joined in transactions by other goods of a diverse range. In 873 Ausanio and his wife Lallina, together with Domingo and his wife Ailo, made a donation to San Salvador that included a cow and calf, a sheep, a goat, a ‘barrel of fifteen measures’ (‘cupa de quindecim miedros’) and a vineyard. The details of this deal were contextualised spatially by the roads, villages and natural features that framed this world; in this instance, features of the landscape seem to have acted as communal reference points for the charter writers and to have helped the transactors to specify the location of their landed possessions.24 Thus, the horizons of those involved in these ninth-century transactions were local in the sense that they were confined to the Liébana, and often, indeed, probably to no more than one or two villages, and an appreciation of the features of the landscape, using these latter as points of reference in the documents, remained crucial to transactors. These charters feature statements of the precise contours of what was being transacted and between whom, each statement an attempt to ensure that ownership was not in doubt between members of the village community. The social and economic needs of the community were also catered for by basic channels of communication, as demonstrated by references to byways and roads, some of which were described as ‘public’ in the charters.25 The designations given to settlements joined by roads, and the meaning of these designations, are harder to understand, but have not escaped the attention of scholars. Díez Herrera, tracing what she characterises as the ‘feudal society’ which emerged from the eighth century, imposing itself upon a ‘sociedad indígena’ in the process, argues that the valley was the spatial unit of territorial organisation par excellence in early medieval Cantabria.26 The valley, she explains, was the most basic element of a three-tiered organisational structure which framed progressively smaller social units: the village or its equivalent (locus, villa, even ecclesia); and the solar (‘related to the family unit’), both of which became focal points of the newly emerging feudal society which she envisages to have been characteristic of Cantabria from around 800.27 had been put to use: for example, from T15 (884), ‘placuit nobis ut uinderemus uobis Cesao et Agapio uel ceteris fratres de Uellenia de Sancto Saluatori in Grandouelia terram uacabilem’. 24 T12. For features of the landscape as guides to location, note the reference to ‘agrum ad Mus subtus strata, iusta illa fonte, et illas salges [willow trees] et macanares [apple trees] in uilla Lones’. 25 ‘illa strata publica que discurrit ad Pautes’: T9 (847). 26 ‘Se parte de la premisa de que la unidad conocida como “valle” constituía una forma de organización del espacio propia de comunidades ligadas por unas relaciones de parentesco, por una costumbres derivadas de la ocupación gentilicio, y por un aprovechamiento económico ganadero basado en la ocupación seminómada’: C. Díez Herrera, La formación de la sociedad feudal en Cantabria: la organización del territorio en los siglos IX al XIV, Santander 1990, 17. 27 ‘relacionado con la unidad familiar’: ibid. 14–15. The solar is in fact rare in the ninthcentury documents. P2 (861) is an early example: ‘in alio loco solarem’.

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In truth, however, the structure of settlements in the ninth-century Liébana resists simple classification. Words describing the landscape and its features were various and it is not possible to speak of a spatial hierarchy as if the different words used in our texts can be compared to Russian dolls, each term describing a space that fitted neatly inside another. Reality seems to have been much less clear-cut than that. Sometimes, as is the case in a document from 831, location and settlement were contextualised by way of reference to a church, which is fitting given that this might have been the only building in the village where inhabitants could congregate.28 Roads, fields and vineyards were also used in this way in the charters, marking out who owned what and where, at one and the same time dividing land, and by so doing lending cohesion to the social geography of the village. Measures such as these were doubtless in part designed to guard against trespass or the misappropriation of plots of land. Although no legal cases regarding these issues exist in the ninth-century material, uncultivated land was being sought out in order to be put to use, ensuring that the need for title deeds was almost certainly on the rise. The monks of San Salvador, for instance, were alive to the possibility of expansion and the signs are that they set tenants to work on some of their land, as one would expect.29 Landed assets of course ranged in size, as did the villages in which they were located. Villa is a commonly used term, seen in hundreds of early medieval Spanish charters, and the list of appurtenances attached to such references varies so widely in extent that the word must have described settlements ranging from the very small, perhaps no larger than a household, to the very large, which may have included several buildings and plots of land.30 Locus, another term that appears in the charters, may well have simply been a reference to a small settlement in a given named place. But although some references indicate an awareness of a wider political framework, a fact evidenced, for example, by a sale made to the brothers residing at Villeña, specifically located in ‘the territory of Liébana’, there is no consistent indication in our charters that terms such as locus, villa and territorium were neatly grouped into a hierarchy of settlements.31 T7. Hence Ordoño’s and Proflinia’s description of churches in the following terms: ‘notum sit ecclesie id est domini et patroni nostri gloriose Sancte Marie, cuius basilica sita est in locum quod dicitur Barao, sibe et Sancto Petro, cuius basilica sita est in locum que dicitur Sexenia’. 29 For San Salvador’s pursuit of uncultivated land (‘terram vacabilem’) see T15 (884) and T16 (884). The relationship between Dominicus and his wife and San Salvador was seemingly that of a vineyard held under tenurial arrangements (‘ipsa vinea … quem abui ad laborandum ad partes de vos’). 30 ‘ecclesie uocabulo Sancti Adriani qui est in uilla Sionda in Liuana’: T17 (885); ‘Trado mea et omnia hereditate que abeo inter meos germanos uel heredes in uilla Causecadia’: T9 (847). 31 ‘uinderemus uobis fratribus qui estis abitantes in locum Bellenie, territorio Liuanense’: T11 (868). Locus was not uncommon in these early documents, for example, ‘Et ego Dominicus et uxor me ad abo uinea in Torenao in locum dicitur Sautu’: T12 (873). Also, ‘in loco Uellenie’: T10 (852); ‘in locum Uellenie’: T9 (847); ‘in locum quod dicitur Barao’: 28

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On the contrary, variation points to the fact that in the ninth century it was social memory and the practical knowledge of the individuals involved in the creation of the charter that dictated how a place was described. Terminological usage must also have depended to some extent on the preferences of individual scribes, who, despite selecting from amongst a learned palette of possible formulae, are bound to have had different notions of the correct usage of terms like locus and villa. For this reason, the English term ‘village’ will be used here and throughout this book for the large or small settlements in which nuclear families lived and farmed, tended to orchards and vineyards, and possibly went to church, whether called villa or locus in the documents. This use is justified by the fact that the ninth-century documents suggest that the small-scale, villagelike settlement was the most important frame of reference for the members of local society themselves.32 Donation and prayer The inhabitants of these villages moved from field to stream and from storehouse to church. On their doorstep was the monastery of San Salvador, a repository of spiritual solace and material assistance, and a target for favourwinning donations. Donations made to win patronage and protection were part and parcel of life, and such activity is discernible in many parts of Europe in the early Middle Ages.33 But donation was much more than a token gesture, for it had very real practical implications for the donors; after all, sizable quantities of valuable assets sometimes changed hands, which must have helped to redraw the contours of social relations within villages, as institutions found themselves fortified (at the expense of their rivals) as a result of these pious acts of giving. Expectations are also challenged by the form that donation sometimes takes. The donation to San Salvador made by Valeriano, his father Teodario, and the members of the religious community at Osina, which included the monastery at Osina and all of its effects, represented the transfer of an impressive array of valuable assets; amongst them were books and a mill, alongside the more standard plots of land.34 Yet this document of gift T7 (831). This list is by no means exhaustive. It also occurs in Piasca documents, thus ‘in alio loco mea portione’: P4 (869). 32 The question of the utility of the term ‘village’ has generated much debate. See C. Wickham, ‘Rural society in Carolingian Europe’, in McKitterick, New Cambridge medieval history, ii. 510–37 at p. 529. For rural settlements as ‘pré-villageois’ see R. Guadagnin, Un Village au temps de Charlemagne: moines et paysans de l’abbaye de Saint-Denis du VIIe siècle à l’an mil, Paris 1988, 116; cf. J. A. Quirós Castillo, ‘Las aldeas de los historiadores y de los arqueólogos en la alta edad media del norte peninsular’, TSP ii (2007), 65–86. 33 B. Rosenwein, To be the neighbor of St Peter: the social meaning of Cluny’s property, 909–1049, Ithaca 1989, is excellent but merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to analysis of the gift. 34 ‘terras, uineas, pomares, libros, solares, molina, gresu adque regresu tam mobile quam ecciam et immobile uel ubicumque hereditantem nostram’: T6 (829).

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calls itself a pactual agreement of the sort already discussed (‘pactum istum’, ‘in oc pacto’), while it retains some of the formal characteristics of a donation, blurring the lines between the two. This might signify that the pact approximated more closely to a normal business transaction than has previously been considered; on the other hand, ‘pactum’ might simply refer here to something that has been agreed by those who prompted the charter’s creation. In any case, the transfer of a relatively large amount of goods was not unusual in the ninthcentury Liébana, and the circulation of private wealth was certainly a going concern for richer elements of the village world. In 828 Popendio and Nonita donated the church of San Pedro de Viñón, which they built, together with its appurtenances, to San Martín de Turieno.35 In both 843 and 847 San Salvador received a wide range of land and possessions stretching across several villages; these were probably the gifts of wealthy villagers who may have been prominent community figures.36 The construction of ninth-century ‘property portfolios’ by means of cumulative and consistent purchasing campaigns has, however, escaped the documentary record. This may to some extent reflect patterns of charterwriting in the ninth century, but it also stands in contrast with ninth-century patterns elsewhere in Europe, as well as with the tenth-century Liébana.37 This is not to say that there were not pockets of concentrated wealth here in the ninth century; witness the church-building activity of Popendio and Nonita, who must have been amongst the richer inhabitants of the region. None the less, this level of wealth, and the social status that presumably went along with it, is perhaps best characterised as that of medium-scale landowners.38 As such, Popendio and Nonita might well have owned significant property in addition to the church that we know about, but they are not frequent fixtures of the documentary record and they do not appear to have come from families that exercised political authority in or beyond these villages. They did not act as political fulcrums for their community, serving it in any public sense, and as far as we know they did not buy up plots and parcels of land in piecemeal fashion, assembling over time a property portfolio that would alter the social, economic and political contours of their society. These were rich local men and women who probably took pride in the prestige that donation to monasteries afforded them in the local community, but it bears reemphasising that they appear to have been small fry when compared with medium landowners in other parts T5. ‘dabo uobis mea quinta in Caosecalia, in Fracserio in Uaodo, I terra, pumares, uineam in Mus, res, uestitum, ferramenta, exitum adque regresum’: T8 (843); ‘omnia mea hereditate que abeo inter meos germanos uel heredes in uilla Causecadia, in Frasino, in Penbes, idest terras, pomares, uineas, in Mus et terra bacabile usque illa strata publica que discurrit ad Pautes: baca, boue, res, promiferas [sic] uasa, ferramenta, prata, montes et fontes’: T9 (847). 37 For discussion of what she terms ‘multiple owners’ see W. Davies, Small worlds: the village community in early medieval Brittany, London 1988, 91–5. 38 Wickham, Framing the early Middle Ages, 386–7. 35 36

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of Europe.39 Thus, it may well be that medium-scale landowning was simply as grand as landed interest got in the ninth-century Liébana. What ties these donations together, apart from the relatively large scale of the assets donated, is the stated motivation of religious piety which inspired a good deal of donation to churches in the ninth-century Liébana, just as it did across medieval Europe. Most of these ninth-century documents feature strongly expressed statements of the righteousness of the act of donation, and some of them included a variation on the stock phrase ‘pro remedio animae’; thus, the desired effect of donation appears to have been reward in the afterlife.40 Religious zeal was not the only motivation, however, for peasants could and did donate for reasons which were altogether worldlier. Donation offered the less wealthy, not necessarily just the very poor, a mechanism by which they could enter the patronage network of richer, or more influential, neighbours.41 One way to do this without endangering one’s means of support was to donate a fraction of one’s holdings as a gesture of good will, although not insubstantial amounts were also donated for this purpose; what mattered was that the donation symbolised that the parties giving and receiving were thereafter involved in a new social relationship that went beyond the purely spiritual or economic. There is some evidence of the humbler members of ninth-century society seeking the patronage of richer members of the community by gift-giving. Gratus and Egila, for example, swapped their vineyard for another owned by the monks of San Salvador presumably with the objective of becoming unofficial clients of a richer group of people.42 The possible economic benefits of such an operation for this pair cannot be known from this charter, and it is hard to imagine that the monks of San Salvador would have consented to the deal if they had not looked positively upon the exchange; but Gratus and Egila would have been aware of the symbolic value of committing this act of exchange to the documentary record and of the benefits that they thought it would bring.

Compare, for example, Gundualdo of the Garfagnana in Tuscany, an eighth-century medium owner whose range of landed holdings, admittedly better documented, saw him own property much more extensively than, say, Popendio and Nonita. It could be argued that this apparent difference is a trick of the surviving documentation, but since Popendio and Nonita owned a church, and saw fit to document its donation (demonstrating that the recording of the transfer of possessions in writing was already an aspect of ninth-century Liébana life), it must be likely that they would have documented their other transactions, should they have been extensive. For Gundualdo, and medium landowners more generally, see C. Wickham, The mountains and the city: the Tuscan Apennines in the early Middle Ages, Oxford 1988, 40–5, 55. 40 In the ninth-century documents from Santo Toribio, four feature this phrase or some variation: T7 (831); T8 (843); T9 (847); and T10 (852). This formulation could also be claimed as a motivating factor on occasion, as it was in T2 (796): ‘partem uendimus partem donamus ut pro mercedem anime nostre’. On the ‘pro anima’ formula see Davies, Acts of giving, 115–20. 41 Wickham, ‘Rural society’, 532. 42 T16 (884). 39

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Interestingly, land could be alienated or incorporated in fractions, and the Santo Toribio charters contain references to ‘fifths’ (quintae), as do documents from other areas of the peninsula.43 Wendy Davies has noted that ‘fifths’ almost always formed part of donations and not sales, which suggests that the symbolism of the donation was paramount.44 Should a genuine fifth of a property have been given away or sold, this could have varied in size considerably from one occasion to the next (depending on the size of the whole holding), but its desired effect was probably that of forming loose ties of patronage. It is indeed plausible, as Davies argues, that the meaning it conveyed was that of ‘our share’, or ‘our portion’, rather than strictly one fifth; after all, the terminology would have resonated with anyone writing up these charters who had a basic knowledge of Visigothic law, the ‘fifth’ being the legally alienable portion of family property.45 Given that people frequently alienated more than a fifth, and taking into account the practical difficulties involved in carving up land in this way with due precision, there are further reasons to doubt that it commonly described a precise fraction. None the less, even if understood as merely a portion of property given away so as to foster closer relationships between donor and recipient, the fact that the fraction points to a Visigothic legal context demonstrates that at least some individuals were aware of the provisions of the Lex Visigothorum.46 The implications of this are striking, for they indicate that the written word was embedded in this society to a far greater extent than our few documents might otherwise imply. And here the issue of documentary survival emerges once again. The small sample we have for the ninth-century Liébana makes extrapolation of analysis a risky business; none the less, the preponderance of donation charters among the surviving material does seem to tally with what we know about a rising tide of pious donation throughout the continent in this period.47 Incentives to retain records of donation, in which the richer members of the community saw the memory of their piety set down for posterity, abounded: monasteries too benefited from the prestige that links with such individuals afforded, as well as from the material assistance enshrined in the donation. Sale was a different matter, especially small-scale sale conducted between peasants, whose small holdings are less likely to have interested the custodians of archives than did the grand donations of churches or land that these same institutions received from the valley’s wealthier inhabitants. Charters of sale ‘dabo vobis mea quinta in Caosecalia’: T8 (843); ‘concedo meam quintam’: T10 (852). Davies, Acts of giving, 76. 45 For Davies’s discussion see ibid. 76–80. See also L. García de Valdeavellano, ‘La cuota de libre disposición en el derecho hereditario de León y Castilla en la alta edad media’, AHDE ix (1932), 129–76. For the Visigothic precedent see LV iv. v. i; cf. the recent discussion of the fifth in Barrett, ‘The written and the world’, ch. v. 46 It is interesting to note that quinta means ‘estate’ in modern Portuguese. 47 These observations are put in a peninsula-wide context in Barrett, ‘The written and the world’, ch. i. 43

44

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sometimes show more modest assets changing hands. For instance, we have already seen that Pedro and Leudesinda, their children Ervigio and Emiliana, and Egeredo received various everyday goods from San Salvador in exchange for a vineyard.48 Likewise, Sunto and Valencio sold uncultivated land to the same monastery, at a value of six modios, paid in goats, a useful commodity for peasants.49 It has often been assumed that individuals like Sunto and Valencio were brow-beaten into such sales, yet they do not profess hardship nor recognise having received the assistance of neighbours, which we sometimes see in charters, and there is no evidence of vertical pressure forcing the sale. Quite simply, they may not have been able to afford the luxury of giving their land away when they could enjoy the benefits brought about by selling to their advantage. The possibility that this peasant couple not only willingly entered into the agreement, believing it to be in their strategic interest, but that they may have instigated it, should not be discounted. This is the impression gained from the four ninth-century Piasca charters that survive in the record too: all describe the sale of modest plots of land and goods between peasants. This being the case, the initial impulse behind these sales likely came from a desire to add to or to consolidate landed holdings – that is, to keep up with, or even surpass, the Joneses. This society, in turn, must have been one in which it was perfectly possible for peasants to do exactly that. Doing good to family and neighbours Discussion so far has focussed on some of the wealthier individuals and institutions of this society: what then, of its poorer members? A document from 875 (T13), which describes an act between two lay parties in which Pepino and Petronio were commended to Fraterno and Vistregetona as reward for their gift of an orchard in Argüébanes in Valdebaró, affords the clearest glimpse of these poorer elements. The commended pair evidently sought the material protection of their presumably richer protectors, who promise to ‘do good’ to Pepino and Petronio, and the language of the charter makes it clear that this relationship went beyond simple entry into a patronage network (‘pro quod nos commendatos habetis et bonum facitis’). None the less, given that this is the single unambiguous documented example of commendation in the Liébana before 1000, it is as well to remain cautious when thinking about the extension and incidence of this sort of social relationship in the ninth and tenth centuries. Commendation, especially when associated with a variant of the formula ‘bonum mihi facere’ (receiving ‘good things’, such as protection, as a reward for gift), as in T13, ‘need not imply personal, much less exclusive,

T11 (868). T15 (884). Note that the modius was a common Roman unit of dry measure, approximately equal to the imperial unit of one peck.

48 49

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commitment’.50 Neither was the act of giving oneself over to more powerful neighbours or institutions necessarily indicative of the renunciation of one’s social, economic or legal rights. The explicitly religious contexts of T6 and T9, dated respectively to 829 and 847, means that phrases such as ‘abrenunciamus nos’ and ‘trado me’ probably signified entry into a religious community rather than the surrendering of personal rights.51 Personal rights did not extend to everyone, however, and occasionally the lowliest members of this society can be glimpsed. For instance, for the sake of their souls, Ordoño and Proflinia, recognising that they had already freed ‘homines’ from their service, made provisions for the freeing of others in 831.52 It is just as likely that these ‘homines’ were the domestic servants of this couple rather than tied peasant cultivators, since no contractual arrangement is made explicit. Nothing suggests that these ‘homines’ were slaves either, although some level of unfreedom must be assumed given the use of the term.53 Similar caution needs to be exercised where evidence of the cultivation of the land of larger institutions by peasants is clear, for it is by no means certain that this represented onerous servile dependence. Thus, Ausanio’s description of the land that he worked for San Salvador (‘uinea in Torenao in locum que dicitur Sautu quem abui ad laborandum ad partes de uos’) speaks of a simple landlordtenant relationship: here, land was held in tenancy for the express purpose of working it.54 It is probably best to think of these relationships as the result of business agreements, albeit in the context of social inequalities of the sort that exist in most societies: there is nothing in the documents that suggests that sales and donations were framed by violent coercion. On the contrary, land seems to have circulated according to more prosaic and worldly concerns, primarily the need to solidify social relationships in material terms and to meet the practical needs of buyers and sellers.55 Personal freedom and private assets in W. Davies, ‘Lordship and community: northern Spain on the eve of the year 1000’, in C. Dyer, P. Coss and C. Wickham (eds), Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages: an exploration of historical themes, Oxford 2007, 18–33 at pp. 26–7. 51 In a transaction dated to 957, eight women and two men gave themselves over (using the formulation ‘trado me’) with their assets to Santa María de Piasca; this was to enter a religious community and to commit themselves to the monastic life, but it did not suppose what we might call ‘tied dependence’. The charter is P15. 52 ‘de homines uero nostra quod liberabimus sibe etiam quodquod in seruicio abemus sint liberi post nostrum obitum … pro animabus nostris’: T7. 53 For the absence of slaves from the Liébana see Montenegro Valentín, Santa María de Piasca: estudio de un territorio, 63–4. 54 The relationship defined by the ‘ad laborandum’ agreement has been defined by L. García de Valdeavellano: ‘Por el contrato ad laborandum, el propietario cedía el disfrute de una tierra a un labriego para que la labrase o la plantase de viña y el labriego se comprometía a pagar un censo al dueño en reconocimiento de su dominio’: Curso de historia de las instituciones españolas: de los orígenes al final de la edad media, Madrid 1968, 250. 55 T12 (873). 50

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fact characterise a world where small families of varying wealth relied more on unofficial ties of patronage than on binding oaths of dependence. Payment of dues and specific duties are not clear from the evidence at this stage (although they probably existed in some measure), and whilst there were landlords for whom others toiled, there was certainly, by early medieval western European standards, a significant number of free peasant proprietors in the ninth-century Liébana.56 At the heart of these communities was the family unit, and the language used to describe the whereabouts and origins of land more often than not placed it within the context of family ownership and inheritance. On occasion, straightforward recognition of one of the party’s familial connections presumably added practical information as well as legitimation to what were, after all, documents between local inhabitants who would in many cases have been known to each other. Hence, for example, the fact that Sempronio’s donation of his landed possessions and associated goods to San Salvador, began with a simple description of his familial background: ‘Ego Simpronius qui sum filius patris mei Seueri et matris mee Seuere’.57 Individuals such as Sempronio could act alone, but couples also bought or gave together. A ninthcentury charter from Piasca demonstrates that, whilst the normal practice of mentioning both man and wife remained important, women could take the lead, especially if they played a key role in the transaction; Recoire, who in two other Piasca documents is dutifully named as the wife of Argemundo, was singled out in 857 by her brother, the donor.58 To mention one’s immediate family, it seems, held some appeal for villagers looking to emphasise the familial origins of the land that they were selling or donating. This may have lent the deal legitimacy within these small village communities, especially when the parents of those involved were well known, and it may even have given leverage to the transactors.59 Familial legacy, after all, was frequently evoked as a reference point when it came to describing the origins of land due to undergo transfer of ownership. Witnessing was also important, although the status of very many of the people witnessing documents is not specified. Those specifically described as witnesses may have been neighbours, or perhaps members of what Matthew Innes has helpfully called the ‘practical kin’ – that is, the ‘relatively restricted immediate family’; Davies, ‘Lordship and community’, 6. T9 (847). 58 ‘Ego Nunnila qui sum filius patris mei Ariulfi. Tibi iermane mee Recoire et marito tuo Argemundo’: P1 (857). The other two documents see the couple styled as ‘Argemundo, et uxori tue Recoire’. They are P2 (861) and P3 (861). 59 Cf. S. D. White, Custom, kinship, and gifts to saints: the Laudatio parentum in western France, 1050–1150, Chapel Hill 1988. Although a mechanism for familial approval of donation like the Laudatio parentum did not exist in quite the same way in ninth-century Spain, the involvement of members of the nuclear family clearly responded to the same impulse: to formalise, legitimise and memorialise the parties involved. 56 57

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but to imagine that the witnesses of these documents might be identified as members of a wider collective, bound together by ties that extended beyond the kernel of the family home, has no basis in the evidence, despite its ubiquity in the Spanish secondary literature.60 In fact, it is actually very hard to make a solid case for the presence or influence of wider kin collectivities in these documents. Piecing together the public Before 900 there is not much evidence of a public presence in this world. One ninth-century charter, a confession recounting a dispute settled at court, provides an interesting exception to this general rule. In 885 a judicial meeting was held at which Lellito and Lillo surrendered their right to the church of San Adrián in Sionda, which was awarded by six judges to the monastery of San Martín (presumably San Martín de Turieno, hence the document’s survival in its cartulary).61 Lellito and Lillo had been taken to court by a deacon named Salamiro, who acted in the name of San Martín, and a bishop, mysteriously called both Sisacando and Sisperiado in the document, whose seat is not stated. Lellito and Lillo claimed to have received the church of San Adrián from the same bishop who was supposedly responsible for the case brought against them, but they ultimately recognised that the church of San Adrián had been ceded by its founders to San Martín, and that they had therefore been unlawfully in possession of it for some six years. The bishop was not present at any stage of the proceedings, and it has not been possible to corroborate his existence or his seat on the basis of any other contemporaneous sources.62 It is in any case far from clear that the practical reach of episcopal power extended to large swathes of the northern fringe of the peninsula at this time. What is most striking about this confession is that it presents us with a quandary. The absence of king, count or bishop at these proceedings, and, in fact, anywhere on the ground in the ninth-century Liébana, suggests that judicial business was not truly ‘public’ if this term is taken to imply an expression of central power mediated via local officials. On the other hand, the proceedings were conducted in the presence of local power-brokers acting in unison (churchmen and judges – even if these latter held, stricto sensu, no nominal public function). Moreover, the case followed absolutely standard procedure, even making use of standard language, both of which have correlates all over the northern peninsula; indeed, standard formula and practice of the type seen here almost Innes, State and society, 53. T17. 62 A connection between the bishop of T17 and Sisnando of Iria-Compostela, based mostly on a tradition which has it that this latter was a native of the Liébana, is too speculative to merit much investigation; discussion of it can be found in Loring García, Cantabria, 235–41. For its origins see CI vi–vii, at pp. 111–13. 60 61

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certainly reflect long-established Visigothic models. Local assembly justice of this sort reflected neither public nor private justice in their pristine forms, but rather the regional variant of more or less securely established procedures and traditions. Other charters provide clues of a different sort, although what they say about the existence of public apparatus or functionaries is not easy to decipher. The references to the ruling monarch which bring most charters to a close are best interpreted as an aspect of documentary practice attesting a very generic conception of the existence of a distant authority. Perceptible links to royal authority within the Liébana are virtually non-existent, and the physical presence of kings and their officers is not attested in ninth-century documentation. That being said, the donation by Ordoño and Proflinia of all of their assets to Santa María de Baró in 831 is one important exception to this rule, because this couple, demonstrating their wealth and prestige, included amongst their donation land they had received ‘de donatione regis’.63 This laconic reference is buttressed by the recognition of some sort of notional basic administrative structure in another charter, this time from 828, in which the authority of the count and the king is invoked.64 These indications of some sort of awareness of the Liébana’s place in a wider political framework are exactly that – indications of awareness. And although Ordoño and Proflinia’s donation charter suggests that the king owned land in the Liébana, these documents are not proof of the genuine projection of royal power, or indeed of devolved royal power in the hands of regional agents in the ninth century. This was a landscape in which the exceptionally powerful, and the magnificently rich, whether loyal and cooperative magnates or ‘over-mighty’ subjects, were conspicuous by their absence in a way that they most certainly were not in other parts of the kingdom, including Galicia, with profound consequences for the scale of landed holding in this region.

T7. T5.

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3

The Emergence of a Village Elite One of the most interesting aspects of the ninth-century Liébana documents analysed in the previous chapter is the apparent absence of lay persons who sought to engage on a regular basis in transactions and deal-making within their local community. Some villagers occasionally bought, sold or donated amongst themselves or with the Church, but they do not seem to have engaged in the construction of large property portfolios by means of frequent purchase, or to have consolidated this position by securing strategic marriage alliances with suitable families. Prominent landowners of this sort, whom we might imagine to have stood out in the documentary record, are simply nowhere to be seen in the ninth-century charters, although donations from before 900 do at least make differences in wealth and social prestige clear enough. Making sense of these trends in transactional density presents a considerable challenge, especially when working with a small corpus of charters; after all, it may be the case that the intensive and consistent purchase of land by ninthcentury Lebaniegos did indeed take place, but that the records of such activity have since been lost. On the other hand, given that the evidence from across the northern third of the peninsula suggests that the written recording of such deals was an established practice in the ninth century, the existence of any persons who had made themselves substantially rich by means of recurrent purchase would probably have led to the retention of at least some of the documents recording that process. Large-scale private property ownership almost always leads to the production of title deeds, and these are almost always worth keeping because of their inherent and multivalent usefulness. For this reason, fourteen Santo Toribio documents from the first third of the tenth century are very revealing, because the transactions they record describe for the first time the rapid rise to prominence of a local lay couple in the Liébana, Bagaudano and Faquilona, whose entrepreneurial instincts saw them and their children attain and consolidate significant landed wealth during the tenth century.1 First documented in 914, this couple came to own substantial landed holdings in the Liébana, but it is the extension and enlargement of their property portfolio via the regular acquisition of land that marks them out in the documentary record of Santo Toribio from what came before. One of their The fourteen documents are T18 (914); T21 (915); T23 (916); T25 (918); T26 (920); T27 (921); T28 (921); T32 (925); T35 (927); T36 (927); T39 (930); T40 (930); T41 (932); and T42 (915–932). 1

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sons, Opila, became abbot of the monastery of San Martín in the 940s, and another, Savarico, married Vistrilli, the daughter of Munio and Gulatrudia, another Liébana lay couple of substantial means.2 The consolidation of family ties in the upper reaches of Liébana society, as well as the creation of stable links between elite families and ecclesiastical institutions, seems to have gathered pace in the tenth century. But a detailed examination of the nature of the social prominence enjoyed by Bagaudano and Faquilona can help us to appreciate its overwhelmingly local scale and origins – a scale which neither approached that of lay elites in many other parts of the peninsula, including Galicia, nor led to the translation of their wealth into political power. The task of this chapter is to consider how the rise of this parvenu couple elucidates the more profound socio-economic and political changes that took place in this mountain valley between approximately 900 and 1031. Just as crucially, this chapter will consider the effects of Bagaudano and Faquilona’s purchasing campaign on the wider community in which they lived. Before the first recorded instance of Bagaudano and Faquilona’s business affairs, the charters offer no clues at all as to their background or status; their origins, on both sides, are totally unknown to us, and when we first encounter them, in 914, there is no evidence to suggest that they enjoyed elite status within the community. Yet by the middle third of the tenth century theirs was amongst the major landowning families of the Liébana, and their local influence was such that their son Opila, while abbot at San Martín de Turieno, was able to oversee and administer an important series of donations to his monastery, thanks in part to the prestige that his parents enjoyed as important landowners. These donations shored up the monastery’s position at the apex of Liébana society, and an orthodox narrative would have it that they created deeper and more entrenched socio-economic division between the haves and the have-nots of the village world. However, this only tells half the story, for there remained considerable room in this society for peasants to buy and sell of their own accord, and to operate largely independently, even after San Martín began to flex its economic muscle in the second half of the tenth century. Self-improvement and material gain were indeed very real possibilities, for this We know about the family links between these individuals thanks to explicit references in the charters: in T28 (921), Opila and Savarico are named as the sons of Bagaudano and Faquilona in a letter of adoption (‘ut faceremus uobis iam dictis Bagaudani et uxori tue Faquilone et filios uestros Hopilani et Sauarico’); in T54 (951), Vistrilli is clearly shown to be the daughter of Munio and Gulatrudia in a donation that she makes to San Martín de Turieno (‘Ego Vistrilli, qui sum filia Monioni et Gulatrudiene’); in T64 (962), it is made clear that Savarico and Vistrilli were married as they are shown to be joint recipients of a donation of land (‘uobis Savarico et uxori tue Vistrilli’). Munio and Gulatrudia first appear in T19 (914), where they are given a domestic servant by a certain Silo: ‘ut donarem uobis iam dictis Munioni et uxori tue Gulatrudie mancipella nomine Facquina, qui est filia Monderici et matris sue nomine, sicut et dono uobis perpetim abiturum’. T38 (929) makes it plain that Retefreda, Tedegonzia, Bauduilli and Didaco were also the children of Munio and Gulatrudia. 2

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Savarico = Vistrilli

Figure 3.  Major families in the Liébana in the tenth century.

Opila

Bagaudano = Faquilona

Major families of the Liébana in the tenth century

Bauduilli

Tedegonzia

Retefreda

Munio = Gulatrudia

Diego

The Emergence of a Village Elite

was a society built upon shifting sands, in which the accrual of landed wealth served to catalyse change that affected rich and poor alike, albeit in different and often unexpected ways. Accordingly, an examination of the impact of Bagaudano and Faquilona’s transactions opens up a uniquely valuable window onto the middling ranks of this world. At the same time, it unveils the workings of rural communities, placing peasant actors centre stage, and not simply relegating them to the margins, as historical bystanders obliged to look on passively as a leading family added to its landed holdings. The picture that emerges is very striking: in the early tenth century, Bagaudano and Faquilona made significant inroads into the landed wealth of their fellow villagers, but this was no imposition from above; this was a tale of a finely-attuned acquisitive instinct operating at the heart of village society, with the result that the contours of a local community were radically altered from within. Such a realisation sheds new light on the concept of social mobility in tenth-century Spain, and has ramifications for the way in which we think about the purpose and motive of transaction across Europe. Landowning, social change and charters: some provisional comment Thanks to the ubiquity of Bagaudano and Faquilona in the early tenth-century documents, this lay couple’s efforts to consolidate their landed wealth have been at the heart of much of the secondary coverage that the tenth-century Liébana has received.3 As one would expect, there have been divergences in opinion, but these have mostly been minor; the majority of scholars, in fact, have considered the emergence of Bagaudano and Faquilona as evidence of a new type of social dynamic often described as ‘seigneurial lordship’, most commonly taken to indicate the growth and intrusion of private powers over the peasantry.4 Just what these private powers entailed seems to have varied from place to place, but everywhere they are thought to have exceeded those that characterised the authority that a landlord ordinarily held over a tenant.5 Barbero and Vigil looked at the proprietorial activity of this lay couple in La formación del feudalismo, 377–80; likewise, Loring García paid them considerable attention, and analysed them in very similar fashion, in Cantabria, 314–28; cf. Díez Herrera, Sociedad feudal, 229–31, for a similar line. A more balanced account is provided in J. Gautier-Dalché, ‘Le Domaine du monastère de Santo Toribio de Liébana: formation, structures et modes d’exploitation’, AEM ii (1965), 63–117. 4 For explicit linkage of ‘competencias señoriales’ with Bagaudano and Faquilona see Díez Herrera, Sociedad feudal, 55 n. 165. 5 The formation of the seigneurie has generated an enormous bibliography. The most significant discussion remains Duby, La Société. Most scholars argue over when and how, not if, lords appropriated and exercised new powers over peasantries, as is clear from C. Wickham, ‘Defining the seigneurie since the war’, in M. Bourin and P. Martínez Sopena (eds), Pour une Anthropologie de prélèvement seigneurial dans les campagnes médiévales (XIe–XIVe 3

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Social historians have been largely in agreement, therefore, that seigneurial power was socially and economically rooted in systematic exploitation, given that it was the lords’ monopoly of land that created the conditions for their later appropriation of the legal and social rights of the peasantry. This framework has had serious consequences for our understanding of social relations in medieval Europe. For example, in the eyes of the advocates of the feudal revolution model, wherever we witness the exchange of landed assets in the documentary record, coercion must have simmered just under the surface of the deal (or even have been overt), because it is otherwise difficult to explain why peasants would have alienated their land to their social betters. In a similar way, for these same scholars, it is assumed that peasants who sold to their richer neighbours (including, by way of example, those that sold to Bagaudano and Faquilona) did so because of vertical pressure, as elites developed new powers over the persons and labour of peasant cultivators, leaving this latter group with little option but to cooperate.6 This is one way of interpreting the changes in social relations that came about as a result of the transfer of landed wealth, and indeed it is true that the threat of violence framed many social relationships in the Middle Ages, just as it has done in all periods. None the less, although social and economic inequalities were at the heart of the tenth-century societies examined here, these inequalities need not have implied the seigneurial dominance of the economically powerful, since landlordly power (sometimes known as domanial power) did not by itself necessitate the growth of classic seigneurial powers, such as the exercise of the lord’s private justice and the imposition of novel dues or renders. Richer peasants lived side by side with their poorer counterparts in many human societies before the tenth century, and it was not always the case that these richer parties developed a sophisticated array of political, judicial and socio-economic mechanisms that allowed them to dominate their poorer neighbours; an awareness of the structural imbalance at the heart of these societies does not alter that fact. In other words, it cannot be assumed that the social order was shaken to its core from the moment individuals or groups adding to their landed holdings can be identified in the documentary record, as tends to happen in much of the secondary literature, with severe and misleading consequences for our chronologies, and our understanding of early medieval society more generally. When subjected to scrutiny, it becomes clear that arguments which assume that the intensive purchase of land necessarily indicates the increasing curtailment of peasant legal and social freedoms have little grounding in the tenth-century charters and look to extrapolate from later conditions in order

siècles): réalités et representations paysannes, Paris 2004, 43–50. For Spanish context see García de Cortázar and Díez Herrera, La formación de la sociedad hispano-cristiana, 189–95. 6 Loring García, Cantabria, 314.

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to project a reading backwards onto an earlier time.7 The tendency to simplify social relations by considering all signs of social change in the village world as indicative of seigneurial domination can be explained in part by the nature of the documentary record: quite simply, the vastly increased number of surviving charters which can be dated to the tenth century or later is often in itself enough to convince scholars that dramatic social change must have been afoot after 900.8 But this tendency also owes something to the familiar trope of understanding writing as merely a technology of power – that is, viewing steadily increasing numbers of documents across the sweep of the Middle Ages as the reflection of ever more complex and exploitative power structures. There may well be an element of truth to this argument, but steadfast adherence to such a view also blinds us to more nuanced appreciations of the social function of writing, and to the many social contexts in which it appears throughout the period studied here. Contemporary records indicate that in the tenth-century Liébana the social and economic activity of peasants was wide-ranging in its scope and character; thus, a correspondingly diverse range of motivations, possibilities and exigencies likely lay behind the decisions that peasants made to buy, sell or donate. These include poverty and the need to form relationships of protection, but they also include calculated advantage, economic gain and social pretensions. All of these motivations, more or less explicitly, find their expression in the Liébana charters, and these documents indicate that the written word formed part of the village-world habitus. Managing property, and securing such arrangements by writing them down, were fundamental concerns at all levels of this society: only by recognising as much can we begin to consider the complexity of the relationship between the ubiquity of text and the demands of proprietorial practice.9 The documentary record bears out this premise, for it makes it abundantly clear that it was not always the case that either the Church or lordly pressure provided the initial impulse behind the diverse activities of peasants described in the charters.10 Non-elite lay actors clearly went about their business in a world in which familiarity with the use and production of documents was a quotidian aspect of life.11 For an example of land accumulation that does not result in the creation of seigneurial powers see, on the ninth-century Abruzzo, Feller, Gramain and Weber, La Fortune de Karol, 53–71. 8 A point noted, and deprecated, in Barrett, ‘The written and the world’, 14; cf. D. Barthélemey, The serf, the knight and the historian, Ithaca 2009, passim, but especially ch. ii. 9 Brown, Costambeys, Innes and Kosto, Documentary culture, passim; Davies, Acts of giving, especially chs vii and viii. An important recent contribution is Barrett, ‘The written and the world’. 10 Consider the peasant transactions from Piasca in the ninth century, plus, for tenthcentury examples, P5, (904); P7 (933); and T59 (961). 11 Kosto, ‘Sicut mos esse solet’, 259–82; M. Innes, ‘Practices of property in the Carolingian empire’, in J. Davis and M. McCormick (eds), The long morning of medieval Europe: new directions in early medieval studies, Aldershot 2008, 247–67. It is not the intention of this book 7

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In particular, caution must be adopted in assuming any correlation between an increasing number of documents and the intensification of feudal social relations. These documents do not need to be interpreted in this way, and a more detailed examination of their content reveals that social and political change in the tenth-century Liébana simply came about when certain local inhabitants saw the transformative social, economic and political potential of large-scale property ownership. Furthermore, although social hierarchies were further consolidated within the Liébana as a result of these actions, the indications are that free peasant proprietors continued to make up the majority of the valley’s population as the millennium dawned. Thus, neither seigneurial domination, nor classic feudal relationships of vassal and fief, are helpful theoretical milestones when attempting to chart a course through the history of this mountain valley before 1031.12 It is to the social dynamics of the village community that we must look for answers. Doing business To discern something of the tasks, rhythms and preoccupations of village life in the tenth century, we are reliant once again on mining the charters for clues. Total numbers of Santo Toribio documents stand at sixty for the tenth century, of which twenty-two are sales, twenty-eight donations, three quasi-adoptions (profiliatio), three exchanges of assets (specifically classified as such and not as normal sales), three records of court cases and one a monastic pact.13 These to offer a detailed analysis of writing or scribal practice, but it is important to note, when reflecting on the embeddedness of writing in this society, that in the 920s alone the Santo Toribio charters furnish the names of four or five scribes (we cannot be certain because Adelobus and Andelibus may refer to the same person): ‘Adelobus presbiter et notarius scripsit’: T28 (921); ‘Andelibus scripsit’: T32 (925); ‘Turibius presbiter scripsit’: T35 (927) ; ‘Marinus escripsit’: T36 (927); ‘Gadda quod scripsit de manu’: T38 (929). 12 It is surely revealing, too, that no evidence of peasant resistance to supposedly new lordly constraints in the tenth-century Liébana can be detected in the material, whereas peasant resistance is clearly identifiable in documentation pertaining to other parts of Spain, even if, usually, not until after 1000. For resistance see Pastor de Togneri, Resistencias y luchas campesinas, passim. For social relationships in which dependence is given a different emphasis, cf. ‘et teneas illa casa de nostro dato et facias nobis con illa seruicio’: T84 (1036); ‘nos commendamus seruire et concedimus nos’: T94 (1065); ‘et abate nostro ac ceteris fratribus serbiencium nos comendamus seruire et concedimus nos’: T95 (1066); ‘ut teneatis illan in prestamo et seruiat uobis omnibus diebus uite uestre’: T104 (1125). Even here, T95 is explicitly describing religious service. 13 Classification is as follows. Sales: T18 (914); T19 (914); T20 (915); T21 (915); T23 (916); T25 (918); T26 (920); T27 (921); T32 (925); T36 (927); T37 (928); T38 (929); T39 (930); T40 (930);T42 (915–932); T43 933); T46 (941); T47 (942); T48 (942); T57 (959); T59 (961); T65 (962). Donations: T29 (21); T33 (925); T34 (925); T35 (927); T44 (940); T45 (941); T49 (945); T50 (946); T51 (946); T52 (947); T53 (950); T54 (951); T55 (952); T56 (959); T58 (961); T60 (961); T61 (962); T63 (962); T67 (963); T69 (963); T70 (964); T71 (966); T72 (967); T73 (975); T74 (977); T75 (980); T76 (990); T77 (990–9). Documents of adoption:

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are augmented by twenty-two tenth-century charters from the monastery of Santa María de Piasca.14 The vast majority of the charters, and therefore of our information on social stratification, hierarchy and relationships, date to the period from 920 to 970, with numbers tailing off thereafter.15 Whilst not a large quantity in relative terms, certainly within the context of the Iberian Peninsula, it must be remembered that the Liébana is a relatively small area, with the bulk of the population settled in the lower reaches of the valleys; the documentary sources therefore describe the social and economic patterns of the village world in detailed and concentrated fashion. Certain patterns or characteristics of the documentary record stand out, and principal among these is the predominance of donations and sales, almost all of which took place within a limited geographical compass restricted to the Liébana, and normally spread across neighbouring villages. Land nevertheless changed hands with a certain fluidity in the tenth century and donation was one method of alienating property that was commonly practised at all levels of society before (and indeed after) 1031. It is in this context of attempting to secure spiritual or material advantage that Gotito made a humble donation of some vines to the priest Vermudo in 977; likewise, and this time in order to cement links between the grandest local families, Vistrilli made large donations to her brother-in-law, Abbot Opila, and San Martín, in 950 and 951.16 At a less exalted end of the spectrum once again, we can turn to Piasca for documents of gift that furnish examples of small peasant proprietors looking to win favour in this life and the next.17 Donations are unsurprising in a world in which ambitious local families and individuals were on the lookout for the sort of social advantage that giving, especially to the Church, could bring. The significance of cycles of sale, however, is harder to decipher. Did sale, for example, commit either party to any future obligation? And might sales made T22 (915); T28 (921); T64 (962). Exchanges: T31 (924); T41 (942); T68 (963). Records of court cases: T30 (922); T62 (962); T66 (962). Monastic pact: T24 (918). 14 These twenty-two are: P6 (930), the foundation document (aristocratic donation); P5 (904) and P7 (933), both peasant sales to lay parties; P8 (941), a monastic pact; P12 (951), P13 (951), P14 (952) and P19 (977), all sales to Piasca; P9 (943), P10 (945), P16 (957), P18 (966), P21 (980) and P23 (981), donations to Piasca; P11 (945), in which a mother commits her daughter to the care of the abbess Ailon at Piasca; P17 (962), a morning gift (‘in dotis titulo arrarum’); P15 (957), in which a group joined the monastic community of Piasca; P20 (979), a very interesting document which shows Ailon (probably the abbess at Piasca) making a sale to Alvaro Muñoz and his wife; P22 (980), in which Ordoño Alfonso gives away rights in a mill for the sake of the soul of Entrigato; P24 (983), a problematic description of court proceedings in a charter with evident anachronisms; P25 (997), an exchange of goods (‘carta comutationis’); P26 (999), describing how four individuals recognised Piasca’s legal right to plots of land and vineyards that they had previously held. 15 Very few documents survive from the period between 1000 and 1031: there are four Santo Toribio charters; T78 (1001), T79 (1001), T80 (1001) and T81 (1015); there is only one Piasca charter from this period: P27 (1030). 16 T74; T53; T54. 17 For two clear examples see P10 (945) and P16 (957).

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to powerful individuals or institutions have been driven by the same impulse towards gaining protection that drove donation, or were peasants simply looking to procure goods with which to pay tax, rent and debts?18 The first tenth-century sale from the Santo Toribio cartulary dates to the year 914 and describes how Pacencius and Hitila sold a vineyard in Mieses to Bagaudano, who on this occasion engaged in business without his wife.19 In format, content and style, it is precisely what we would expect. The charter begins with the identification of the parties involved in the sale, clearly identifying both seller and buyer in their respective roles (‘Ego Pacencius et Hitila tibi Bagaudane’), before going on to describe the location and amount of the assets sold (this latter is not always made clear but in this instance the transactors dealt in thirds or ‘tertiam porcionem’).20 It is then stated that a price was agreed and met, before warning clauses, in which individuals were warned about the penalty to be imposed for contravening the agreement (material or spiritual, sometimes both), closed out the main body of the charter.21 Via frequent purchases of this sort, Bagaudano and Faquilona assembled a portfolio of landed holdings that saw them rise swiftly in Liébana society; as a consequence, new divisions and configurations of parcels of land, orchards and vineyards, came into existence, changing the social landscape around them. Social relations were also altered by the meaning that could be conveyed in something seemingly as innocuous as a sale. For example, it surely would have done no harm whatsoever to individuals like Pacencius and Hitila to do business with Bagaudano and Faquilona, a couple whose actions must have made waves within the wider community.22 But whatever the social leverage or symbolism enshrined in such transactions, they must none the less be interpreted as discrete business deals. Eleven such business deals survive from a period of just under twenty years, yet we can be sure that they do not represent the totality of this activity, because references to Bagaudano and Faquilona in the surviving charters of sale make it plain enough that other sales have not survived in the documentary record.23 The sum of their proprietorial activity 18 For sale as part of horizontal social relationships see Wickham, The mountains and the city, chs viii, ix. 19 T18. In every other transaction of the Bagaudano-Faquilona cycle, the two operate in tandem. Indeed, generalisations about gender roles in the charters are hard to sustain, as Davies has emphasised: ‘Men and women did things together, exercised property rights together, and did both separately as men or as women’: Acts of giving, 187–8. 20 Davies, Acts of giving, 75–80. 21 For more on the form of the sales see R. M. Blasco Martínez, Los cartularios de Cantabria (Santo Toribio, Santa María del Puerto, Santillana y Piasca): estudio codicológico, paleográfico y diplomático, Santander 1986, 68–77. On the complexity of determining how price was met and how value was conceived see L. Feller, ‘Measuring the value of things in the Middle Ages’, Economic Sociology: the European Electronic Newsletter xv (2014), 30–40, < http:// econsoc.mpifg.de/downloads/15_3/feller_15_3.pdf>. 22 Feller, ‘Measuring the value’, 31. 23 ‘iusta alia vestra vinea quem in antea vobis vendidi’: T26.

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can therefore only be guessed at, but they must have assembled quite a portfolio of landed assets in a short period of time. These discrete business deals were none the less framed by considerations which were not purely economic. Business within these micro-worlds relied upon, and itself fostered, intricate networks of personal connections, sometimes formal, sometimes rather less so. And there really can be no doubt that the business we see reflected in the documentary record is merely the tip of the iceberg; references abound which demonstrate the normality and regularity of buying and selling within this society. Land is often seen to have belonged to multiple owners, changing hands many times within the life-spans of individuals who clearly remembered the back-story of the property that they sought to sell or acquire. Hence descriptions that speak of an acquisitorial instinct, alive and alert to the possibilities of strategic deal-making and the transfer of land, such as ‘near to the spring called Masiti, that used to belong to Magnentio’, or ‘that little vineyard and half a plot of land, that I bought from Gumesindo’.24 Neither should we think that this level of interest in sale was restricted to one social stratum. Pepi Adefonsez, the son of a count no less (to whom we shall return), made a sale with his wife Terasia to the priest Adica of family property whose provenance Terasia explained in the charter: namely ‘that vineyard which was bought or acquired by my mother Terasia, who bought it from mistress Gontrada, who was the wife of Nuno Diaz’; interestingly, for Pepi and his wife, donation alone did not serve their interests on this occasion, but a sale perhaps offered the chance of some material gain.25 The picture painted by these transactions helps account for the plethora of examples peppered throughout the Santo Toribio charters of very specific descriptions of the location of landed assets. This was not simply a case of citing geographical location, for it depended too on locating land in accordance with the social contours of the community. For this reason, named individuals and their private property were so frequently made explicit in terms that made sense to neighbours, friends and possible rivals, with descriptions such as ‘right by your house’, ‘next to the field of X’, or ‘by the orchard that belonged to Y’, appearing in many charters.26 This transactional activity, carefully described in the charters and placed in a social context characterised by the cut and thrust of buying and selling, was quite simply part of the fabric of existence in the tenth-century Liébana. 24 ‘iusta fontem que dicitur Masiti que fuit de Magnentio’: T31 (924); ‘ipsa viniola et terra mediatatem, quem comparavi de Gumesindo’: T35 (927). 25 Pepi’s comital status is made clear by his recognition of his part in the proceedings: ‘Ego Pepi et comite … in anc carta quam fieri volui’: T57 (959) . 26 ‘iusta fontem…quem comparastis de Asperino’: T31 (924); ‘agrum Stephani et Iusta illum vestrum agrum’: T21 (915); ‘alia parte latus casa Sonnani’:T35 (927); ‘iusta domum vestram’… ‘ad agrum Armentari’: T20 (915); ‘latum agrum Iulani’: T25 (918); ‘et iusta agrum Leocagi’: T42 (915–32); ‘iusta terra de Recaredo et de alia parte de Revelle’: T47 (942); ‘iusta terram d’Arella’: T48 (942); ‘iusta agrum de Pero Pego’: T61 (962).

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There has often been a reluctance to characterise this sort of activity as business, with scholars preferring the more neutral terms of ‘deal-making’ or ‘transaction’. Clearly, however, peasant farmers transacting with other members of their community, as well as richer elements looking to consolidate their reputation and status, were engaging in something that we can recognisably call ‘business’.27 This was simply not the business of the modern market economy: anonymous, framed by tightly policed regulations, and carried out with a standardised and stable unit of exchange endorsed by the state. This notwithstanding, agreements were made and transactions carried out for the purpose of calculated advantage, at least on occasion, and sometimes the participants were happy to recognise as much explicitly in phrases such as ‘hec fuit inter nos convencio’ (‘this was the agreement between us’); ‘quod negocium fierit inter nos’ (‘which business was done between us’). This was not a true market sensu stricto; transactional density was low by modern standards, and the parameters said to define neoclassical market economics, such as supply and demand, make little sense when applied to the village-level dealing of northern Spain in the tenth century (and can rarely be adumbrated given the nature of the documentation anyway). None the less, something akin to a land market did indeed exist, if by that we mean a relatively stable forum that facilitated ready exchange; such exchange, however, was characterised by the imperatives of social relationships. In other words, what framed and conditioned these deals, on every occasion, were the specific circumstances of who was involved, and what changed hands as a result of the deal: as Polanyi postulated, these transactions were socially embedded.28 They are best made sense of, indeed, by reminding ourselves that ninth- and tenth-century vendors did not act in accordance with modern estimations of rational economic behaviour; indeed early medieval transactions conveyed a multiplicity of meanings which are only partially decipherable today.29 This notwithstanding, although the medium- to long-term economic consequences of the transactions undertaken by peasants were likely to have been poorly understood, the sources furnish evidence which suggests that it is reductionist to claim that these transactions were solely the reflex of the powerful.30 In order to understand the effects of this process we need to examine the documents and to consider what these transactions supposed for the relationship between buyer and seller. None of the sales made to Bagaudano 27 As has been convincingly argued in F. Weber, ‘De l’Anthropologie économique a l’ethnographie des transactions’, in L. Feller and C. Wickham, Le Marché de la terre au moyen âge, Rome 2005, 29–48. 28 K. Polanyi, The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time, New York 1944. 29 Feller, ‘Measuring the value’, 30. 30 R. Pastor, E. Pascual Echegaray, A. Rodríguez López and P. Sánchez León (eds), Transacciones sin mercado: instituciones, propiedad y redes sociales en la Galicia monástica, 1200–1300, Madrid 1999.

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and Faquilona in the early tenth century make reference to the social or economic motivation behind the sale, bar the formulaic establishment and due payment of an agreed price; how this price was settled upon, and whether it reflected some system of valuation not dependent on the leverage that each party brought to the deal, must remain unclear.31 Although the deliberations that led to an agreement over price are opaque in our sources, it is obvious that there existed a very clear link between the notions of sale and price in these documents. Davies has highlighted how tenth-century sales from across the northern peninsula were invariably associated with an explicit expression of the value of what was being transacted; this was usually accompanied by a statement in which we are told how the price was met, sometimes in land or goods, sometimes in metal, sometimes expressed as a certain measure or quantity related to agreed worth.32 The variety of different ways in which price was met in some measure reflects what the transactors needed as recompense for the sale of their assets, as well as what the buying party could offer. This same variety also brings our attention to the fact that coin was not struck in northern Christian Spain until the eleventh century (although the charters suggest that silver-based argenteos were used around the kingdom’s capital in León in the tenth century). It was therefore necessary for transactors to exchange a diverse array of goods in order to complete their deals. These assets ranged from grain and wine to animals such as cows and horses, and items such as barley and wax.33 Peasants thus had access to a range of goods when setting prices and making sales, and in the absence of a stable unit of exchange the element of negotiation must have been central to the process of striking a deal. In the Liébana, this negotiation centred on the buying and selling of vineyards, parcels of land and animals. The relationship between price and value, however, is only one aspect of these transactions. For it remains important to ask questions of the social relations established, consolidated or modified by the business of purchase and sale. It seems probable that on at least some of the occasions on which Bagaudano and Faquilona bought from peasants, the transaction only went as far as the sale suggested and had no legal implications for the seller; that is to say, the selling party did not become the dependants of this couple and thereafter were not obliged to deal with them again in any way. Some sellers may have become clients of Bagaudano and Faquilona, and this could have been a very informal arrangement indeed, but none can be shown to have become dependent cultivators of their land. This notwithstanding, tenancy must have Feller, ‘Measuring the value’, 30–3. W. Davies, ‘Sale, price and valuation in Galicia and Castile-León in the tenth century’, EME xi (2002), 149–74 at p. 155; J. Jarrett, ‘Bovo Soldare: a sacred cow of Spanish economic history re-evaluated’, in R. Naismith, M. Allen and E. Screen (eds), Early medieval monetary history: studies in memory of Mark Blackburn, Farnham 2014, 187–204. 33 T36 (927) and T39 (930) are just two examples of payment taking the form of animals; likewise, T48 (942) and T26 (920) for barley; T43 (933) for payment in wax. 31

32

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been common, since it is hard to imagine that Bagaudano and Faquilona, certainly by the 920s, farmed their own land; therefore, given that servile dependants are so hard to spot in the charters, it is likely that Bagaudano and Faquilona set their free tenants, possibly including some of the vendors, to work on their land. What tenants paid their landlords must have varied, but the scarcity of coinage in the tenth-century Liébana indicates that landlords were overwhelmingly paid in kind. Charters of sale are frustratingly enigmatic in this respect, for they do not discuss, let alone establish, rents or dues of any kind, whereas the one-off payments which the charters do customarily cite are couched in language that suggests that all obligations had been met at the time of writing. Hence, in 916, Liberio describes his sale to Bagaudano and Faquilona in a matter-of-fact tone that emphasises, quite simply, that two parties met to conduct business; no future imposition of any kind is suggested.34 But if rent did not pass between these parties, what sort of economic and social logic underpinned and explained the transaction? First, it is important to recognise that allodialists (that is, landowners in full possession of their land) making sales to other allodialists would not necessarily forfeit social, legal or economic freedoms when making sales (indeed, they would of course have been reluctant to enter into such deals were this the case). On the contrary, the benefits received from the sale must have been perceived by the vendor to outweigh the drawback of having less land in the short to medium term. Second, it is also likely that the fact of peasant families having less land at certain times in their lives than they did at others would not always have been deleterious to their status, or to the quality of their lives. This can be explained by way of allusion to Chayanov’s theory of the peasant life-cycle for, as he suggested, economic differentiation among the peasantry, clearly visible in the Liébana documents (as elsewhere), is likely in many cases to reflect relative family size.35 This is because the size of the landed holdings that peasant families held was in all probability influenced by and coincident with the needs of the family, which depended on the family life-cycle. After all, the age and maturity of the family’s members placed different and fluctuating stresses on its needs; too little land to feed all members of the family was at all times a problem, but families of, say, four people, would not have needed landed resources capable of feeding fifteen. Conversely, Bagaudano and Faquilona’s decision to purchase landed assets far beyond their needs therefore registers a motivation that goes beyond simple economic logic, and must reflect the fact that acquisition was prized for its own sake by at least some members ‘dedi ego, iam dictus Liberius, uobis Bagaudane et uxori tue Faquilone terram in Patrinnana … et de alia parte latus terra nostra, in aderato precio iii solidos et tremise et dedistis mihi precium uaca et uinum in solo et tremise, in quantum ipsa terra ualuit et de precio aput uos nihil remansit’: T23. 35 A. V. Chayanov, The theory of peasant economy, ed. B. Kerblay, R. Smith and D. Thorner, Homewood 1966. 34

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of peasant society. What this peasant couple’s activity represents, then, is the ambition and willingness to take risks which frequently marks out keen social climbers from their peers.36 These circumstances allowed for a certain social mobility within peasant communities, as peasants bought and sold in relation to their own desires and ambitions (as was the case with Bagaudano and Faquilona), as well as in relation to their needs; moreover, this mobility would have been subject to the fluctuating fortunes that befell all families, ensuring that resources were distributed unequally at all times. Conceived of in this way, one can posit the idea that willingness to sell to local individuals within the peasant world, be they ecclesiastical or lay, indicates the relative normality of strategic sale and purchase. Indeed, the clear fragmentation of property into plots of all sorts and sizes, and the ease with which they changed hands, must have had the effect of making peasants more willing to sell as and when it suited them, either for material support or to get on the good side of a local family on the rise. Even more significantly, peasant sale of land in this context can in part be explained by the fact that it must not have always seemed an exercise of irreversible and potentially damaging risk; land, after all, was abundant, and willing buyers and sellers were plentiful. Thus, by considering how social and economic factors help explain the dynamism of peasant micro-economies, we come to see that these small worlds were markedly more dynamic and complex than has often been argued. Crucially, it is the genuine possibility of social mobility, in conjunction with the fragmentation of landed holdings, that explain the economic buoyancy visible in the raft of sales made to Bagaudano and Faquilona in the early tenth-century Liébana. Buying land and finding support The transactions in which Bagaudano and Faquilona engaged in the first third of the tenth century were notably more variable with regard to the range of the people from whom they bought than they were insofar as the geographical spread of their purchases is concerned. The vast majority of their purchases took place in a single valley of the Liébana, which indicates a scale of influence characterised by relatively local contours. These landed acquisitions A similar case is that of the Vivas family, from the village of Provençals, near Barcelona, on whom we possess ninety-one original documents spanning the period 986 to 1084. Two-thirds of these documents date to the period before 1010, and the majority of these show members of this family engaging in the construction of a property portfolio à la Bagaudano and Faquilona, albeit on a grander scale. Bonnassie demonstrated in a landmark article that this family was of modest origins and entirely unconnected to public structures of officeholding; none the less, the success of this family was such that a member of the second documented generation was able to buy land from neighbours on the one hand and the count of Barcelona on the other: P. Bonnassie, ‘Une Famille de la campagne barcelonaise et ses activités économiques aux alentours de l’an mil’, Annales du Midi: revue archéologique, historique et philologique de la France méridionale lxxvi (1964), 261–303. 36

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were concentrated in the Valdebaró, and primarily spread across a handful of villages.37 On one documented occasion Bagaudano and Faquilona can be seen buying land somewhere in the Asturias, but this is the only major exception to a pattern of acquisition based on the villages of the Valdebaró, in which we might presume that they lived too.38 Padriñana was one place in which they clearly developed an especial interest, making five documented purchases there; their proprietorial acquisitions in the vicinity did not go unnoticed by other members of village society, one of whom went so far as to refer to another plot of land that her upwardly mobile neighbours owned in order to locate her own property.39 Hence Emiliana’s description of her land, which was located ‘next to your field, and to that of Leocagi’, in a document dated to 915–32.40 Similarly, Flacencio, Severo and Monesta sold Bagaudano and Faquilona a plot of land in Padriñana in 918 which they located in reference to a fountain and another privately owned field (‘iusta illa fonte et latum agrum Iulani’).41 Property clearly circulated between these people, both within and outside of family groups, as references to the provenance of landed assets demonstrates.42 To prosper none the less required considerable effort. Bagaudano and Faquilona had to buy their way to the top of village society, for they were not a natural target for donation, emerging as they did from amidst the village world, with no evidenced ties to the Church. Protection and prestige were doubtless soon within their gift, but Bagaudano and Faquilona were in no position to distribute spiritual solace and found themselves obliged to engage more directly with neighbours. This meant that outright purchase became crucial to their success. Of the fourteen charters which comprise the Bagaudano and Faquilona cycle, eleven are straightforward compra-ventas (literally, transactions of ‘purchase-sale’) in which the couple bought from neighbours.43 There are Bagaudano and Faquilona acquired assets in Cosgaya in T28 (921), T39 (930) and T40 (930). 38 T32 (925) is the ‘Asturias’ document. T26 (920) describes a very small-scale operation in which Bagaudano and Faquilona bought a vineyard from a peasant couple of seemingly modest means, paying just one cow for it. The transaction was for a vineyard in Autura, which I have been unable to trace. T41 (932) saw Bagaudano and Faquilona exchange a vineyard that they owned in Valdeprado with another owned by Juan and Paterna in Valdebaró. 39 The Padriñana documents are T21 (915); T23 (916); T25 (918); T36 (927); and T42 (915–32). Padriñana is situated in Turieno. 40 ‘iusta ipsum uestrum agrum et iusta agrum Leocagi’: T42. 41 T25. 42 ‘ipsa uiniola et terra medietatem, quem comparaui de Gumesindo’: T35 (927); ‘ipso pumare quem abemus de patre nostro Recefredo’: T39 (930). 43 The sales are T18 (914); T21 (915); T23 (916); T25 (918); T26 (920); T27 (921); T32 (925); T36 (927) T39 (930); T40 (930); and T42 (915–32). These are supplemented by a donation from a lay party to Bagaudano and Faquilona, an exchange of assets with a lay party, and an ‘adoption’: respectively T35 (927); T41 (932); and T28 (921). 37

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Map 4.  Major settlements in the Liébana valley. (based on Cartulario de Santo Toribio de Liébana, ed. L. Sánchez Belda, Madrid 1948)

indications too, that they set about the enlargement of their landed holdings assiduously, buying from all levels of society. Liberio, for example, from whom they bought a parcel of land for the sum of one cow and some wine in 916, is likely to have been a peasant of modest means.44 Likewise, Leon sold Bagaudano and Faquilona a parcel of land in Padriñana for the price of three T23.

44

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animals in 927.45 Emiliana’s modest-looking sale, for which we do not possess a precise date, saw her sell a ‘terra in Patrimana’ to Bagaudano and Faquilona for ‘six quartarios of foodstuffs’.46 Cesoalido may have been slightly richer, but the scale of what he received in return for half of his vineyard in Cosgaya in 930 suggests that he too was a member of peasant society: barley, wine, and livestock were staples of peasant existence.47 What is beyond doubt is that most of the people with whom Bagaudano and Faquilona dealt in this period were ordinary members of peasant society, prepared and willing to make deals and to think strategically about their material status. For the majority of villagers, however, not all concerns were shaped by relations with one’s superiors. One’s standing within the community was also affected by relationships with those of similar status. Peasant cultivators clearly dealt amongst themselves and not only with more powerful lay couples. Indeed, in order to understand the village world more fully, it is crucial to evaluate the activity of peasants when and where we can see them acting independently both of Bagaudano and Faquilona and of local monasteries, such as San Martín. It needs to be stressed that very few unambiguous documented examples in the Liébana charters of this sort of peasant activity survive, but this need not mean that exchange or sale within the peasant stratum was rare. The scarcity of documented examples also reflects the fact that the sort of everyday small-scale transactions in which, say, two peasant couples exchanged an onion bed for a small plot of land, would only have interested the archivists of monastic institutions when that plot of land went on to form part of its property portfolio. Where it did not, it may not have been considered worth keeping (especially after the thirty-year period stipulated by the Visigothic statute of limitations expired), and we should not discount the possibility that monasteries may never have had access to this sort of document at all, should they not have been involved in any way in the original transaction.48 Indeed, as more sophisticated understandings of the social function of writing emerge, it is becoming more possible to conceive of literate contexts that did not involve the Church.49 Richer peasants may even have stored their own copies of charters.50 Whatever the case may be, it seems certain that many charters detailing transactions within the peasant stratum have been lost. But to engage a scribe was itself an act that required planning: on some occasions, therefore, very small-scale

T36. In this instance, the fact that both parties agreed to the price paid is emphasised in unambiguous terms (‘et uos dedistis et ego [sic] accebi’). Normally, there is simply a variation of the formula which states that the agreed price has been fixed and paid, such as in T37 (928): ‘de ipso precio aput uos nihil remansit debitus’. 46 T42 (915–32). 47 T39 (930). 48 LV x. ii. iii–vi. 49 Brown, Costambeys, Innes and Kosto, Documentary culture, passim. 50 This possibility is investigated in Barrett, ‘The written and the world’, ch. iii. 45

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transactions may never have been committed to the written record but ‘preserved’ and ‘adhered to’ by means of the memory of the village community. None the less, some evidence of dealing within the peasant stratum has survived, as has evidence that small-scale operators may have dealt in land more frequently than the surviving documents imply. For example, making a sale to Bagaudano and Faquilona of three plots of land in 915, Ayerio and Munio described their location by reference to a purchase that they had already made from Terasie.51 In 920 Hobelio and his wife Baquina sold to Bagaudano and Faquilona a vineyard in Autura next to one which belonged to a neighbour and another which they had already sold to the couple.52 In 961 Donnina sold a parcel of land in the unidentified place of Cabello to Millán and his wife Emetria, who received just ‘two quartarios of foodstuffs’ by way of payment; clearly, members of local society chose to sell to other people who have the appearance of being non-elite members of society.53 Thus, the land market, and the flux of buying and selling, were not elements introduced to peasant society by voracious landlords, but rather characterised what was still a society in which the opportunity for the acquisition of landed wealth was not restricted to a lay or ecclesiastical aristocratic class, which latter was, at any rate, arguably not very well established by the early tenth century. Furthermore, social differentiation had not yet been reified in language, for Bagaudano and Faquilona, despite their wealth and prestige, surely consolidated by the 920s, at no stage distinguished themselves by utilising labels of social distinction. The few examples that exist of peasant dealing not dependent on the proprietorial interests of aristocratic parties also reveal a world in which peasants looked to neighbours and family for support in times of difficulty. They serve to confirm that the peasant stratum was not a homogenous mass, but was in fact composed of small family groups whose assets varied considerably from year to year and from one family to the next. This was almost certainly the case even within the same village: it is likely, for example, that Recoire and Argemundo, who made three modest purchases in Piasca in the ninth century, were or became richer than the neighbours from whom they bought.54 These neighbours seem to have accepted modest reward for their sale, but possibly benefitted from closer associations with the village’s leading family: after all, standing in the community and networks of support were benefits in their own right. As has been argued, it has long been posited that economic transactions 51 ‘Et ego Aierius dedi uobis altera terra ibidem iusta ipsum quod comparaui de Terasie’: T21. 52 ‘uineam in Auturam iusta uineam de Mirelli et iusta alia uestra uinia quem in antea uobis uendidi’: T26. 53 ‘II quartarios de ciuaria’: T59. 54 P1 (857), in which this couple bought a small part of a vineyard in Piasca; P2 (861), in which the same couple bought a small plot of land (the ‘porcione’ of a peasant couple, worth only ‘duos modios et semodio et sextario’), also in Piasca; and P3 (861), in which a similarly modest purchase was made by Recoire and Argemundo in the same village.

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conducted in an age before ‘true’ markets responded to social as well as economic imperatives. Thus, while Recoire and Argemundo clearly wanted to buy, we should not discount that others may have wanted to sell to them, such were the social benefits embedded in the transaction. There are also signs that one could look closer to home for support. Help within the family was presumably commonplace and is also documented. In 928 Adorario sold a vineyard in Baró to the monks of San Salvador in order to cover a payment that his brother owed to the monastery.55 Clearly, the horizontal ties that extended across families and neighbours to some extent shaped the social reality of tenthcentury peasant existence in the Liébana. What these sales tell us about the composition of society is very illuminating. For a start, it is striking that the Lebaniegos we have seen buying and selling to Bagaudano and Faquilona, and amongst themselves, manifestly enjoyed legal and economic freedom; they were classic free proprietors who were able to alienate their land as and when they chose, within the stipulations of Visigothic law which theoretically governed society. The wealthiest of these free proprietors could presumably become medium landowners whose wealth might afford them the luxury of employing others to tend to their landed assets. However, as Davies has stated, there are too many documents, even in an area of modest numbers of charters such as the Liébana, and too much divergence with regard to the range of personal assets changing hands, to suppose that many of the rural cultivators whom we see in the charters were not peasants who worked the land.56 This is a pattern that does not seem to undergo significant change during the period studied here. So far we have concentrated on sales. This is to a large degree because Bagaudano and Faquilona were unable to inspire donation from smallerscale proprietors, as indeed one might expect.57 Lay elites like Bagaudano and Faquilona were obliged to turn to purchase, for their authority and social standing was not so great as to convince peasants to part with their assets should these latter not be able to secure some material reward in return. Cutting a business deal in the form of a sale or purchase was one thing, but alienation of property by means of donation required even more deliberation. In any case, donation may have had more than one manifestation, and could take complex and convoluted forms. Few questions concerning peasant autonomy in the tenth-century Liébana have been subject to so much critical ‘et dabo uobis illa pro illa scala argentia quam dedistis ad germanum meum Lucidum, quod mihi bene placuit’: T37. 56 Wendy Davies comments that ‘It makes no sense to view such landowners as anything other than members of peasant society. Some will have been relatively rich and some will have had relatively high status in their local communities; others will have been relatively poor’: Acts of giving, 18. 57 T35 (927) is the only example in the Bagaudano-Faquilona cycle of them receiving a donation. In this instance they received half a vineyard and some uncultivated land from a certain Rodanio in an unspecified place. 55

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attention as that surrounding the type of document known as an ‘adoption’, signified in the texts as the act of profiliatio.58 This phenomenon has been interpreted as a mechanism by means of which social elites imposed themselves upon weaker or less powerful persons by acquiring rights in family property to which they hitherto had no familial connection. For Díez Herrera, the profiliatio, an institution of ancient origins (‘institución de origen arcaico’), was transformed in the early Middle Ages into a clear example of commendation to a lord or a powerful family (‘forma clara de encomendación a un señor o a una familia poderosa’).59 Likewise, Loring García interpreted the adoption as yet another example of the insidious extension of lordly rights, describing it as a ‘subterfugio legal’ which allowed the wealthy to intrude on the landed holdings of peasant society.60 But there seems to have been more to the profiliatio than these descriptions imply. In 915 Eulalio agreed to ‘adopt’ the couple Vicente and Bronildi on condition that they care for him throughout his lifetime (‘et ego dum vixero facias mihi bonum et vestitum’); in return, this couple stood to receive the rights to Eulalio’s property after his death (‘et post obitu meo ut abeas ipsa sorte’).61 Were it the case that insolvency had obliged Eulalio to hand his assets over to more powerful individuals, then we would be faced with a quandary, since we would have to explain how it was that Eulalio was vulnerable to predatory neighbours and yet still owned quite so much land: the charter makes it plain that he owned, amongst other things, ‘terras, uineas, casas, res, uestitu’, spread across two villages. In other words, Eulalio’s apparent wealth makes it difficult to imagine that he was strong-armed into leaving his property to Vicente and Bronildi. Moreover, the cartulary provides no indication that he was anything other than a wealthy peasant or medium owner who chose to find a way to alienate his property as he saw fit, which in this case meant by making provision for its donation to members of the community who were not part of his family group in return for care in old age.62 Framed this way, the profiliatio seems less like an instrument of oppression and more like an institution from which ordinary members of society might have benefited. Documents of adoption, in fact, are intimately associated with a wider culture of protecting one’s interests by striking deals with other members of the community, often to the mutual benefit of both parties, in a way that allowed Visigothic legal stipulations to be circumvented. These charters speak to us more of the ingenuity and

Interest in this issue originates from Barbero and Vigil, La formación, 380–94. The profiliatio could sometimes be associated with more straightforward donation and classification is not always easy. The following examples are based upon the specific reference to the act of profiliatio in the body of the text. 59 Díez Herrera, Sociedad feudal, 57. 60 Loring García, Cantabria, 317. 61 T22 . 62 He does not appear again in the cartulary. 58

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dexterity with which peasants sidestepped important social and legal obstacles, than they do of peasant responses to an emergent lordly threat on the horizon. Nor should we imagine that adoptions could not function as instruments of social mobility. For some members of society, profiliatio allowed them to join client networks and this mechanism may in fact have been one of the few avenues of entry into more formal patronage networks consisting of two sets of lay parties. In another case of profiliatio, Bagaudano, his wife and their children were adopted by Vincebiles and Savilli; thus, despite clearly owning fairly substantially themselves, with a wide range of assets in Cosgaya, Baró and Congarna (all in the Valdebaró), Vincebiles and Savilli saw the benefit of establishing a formal alliance with this up-and-coming family of landowners.63 Likewise, we are told that Munio, a major landowner, adopted his cousin Silo, bestowing upon him a large gift of land in the process and demonstrating that what was at stake here was the preservation of family interest in landed property.64 This act of adoption did not seem to constrain the actions of Silo in any way whatsoever; quite the opposite was true, for he later sold this land back to Munio’s wife Gulatrudia.65 Contrary to Díez Herrera’s claims that the institution of ‘adoption’ was characteristically feudal, it is hard to see it as anything other than another option open to peasants as well as aristocrats when it came to the alienation and disposal of their property.66 It is the consistent fluidity of social relations and flexibility of landowning arrangements that stand out in the tenth century, not the ever dwindling autonomy of the majority. Rise and fall Two key events, only imprecisely traceable in the documents, underpinned the translation of Bagaudano and Faquilona’s carefully constructed proprietorial gains into a more solid and institutional expression of their social power – even if this was to prove fleeting. The first of these was the marriage of their son Savarico to Vistrilli, the daughter of another important set of local landowners, Munio and Gulatrudia. The landed wealth of this couple is poorly documented, which indicates that they did not give all or much of it to San Martín, but the scant information that does exist suggests that it almost certainly matched and possibly surpassed that of Bagaudano and Faquilona. It is known, for example, that this family owned estates outside the Liébana.67 Second and more important, however, was Opila’s leadership of T28 (921). ‘quod fecit mihi cartam profiliacionis vir tuus et subrinus meus Munio’: T38 (929). 65 T38 (929). 66 ‘En todos los casos es evidente que esta institución, tal y como se la conoce en la Alta Edad Media, está ya maracada por su carácter feudal’: Díez Herrera, Sociedad feudal, 57. 67 T38 (929): Munio and Gulatrudia’s wealth is said to incorporate estates ‘tam in Liuana (Liébana) quam etiam in Asturias’. 63

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the monastery of San Martín, in Turieno, where he was abbot from the 940s. Little is known about this monastery before the middle of the tenth century, but it was already an old institution by then, and its location in the Valdebaró placed it in the heart of the valley where Bagaudano and Faquilona had made the majority of their transactions.68 What underpinned its increased prominence after the 940s was the fact that it was Opila’s chosen vehicle for the consolidation of his family’s patrimony. Indeed, a major source of its wealth, although undocumented, must have been Opila’s own gift of his share of his parents’ land, for this must be why his parents’ transactions appear in the monastic cartulary. But to understand the impact of this wealth, we need to consider the family’s status in the wider community and to ask how and in what ways this had changed from one generation to the next. Aristocrats from across medieval Europe in the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries marked out their status by means of donation to the Church, as well as by lifestyle, and the holding of public office; many seem to have emphasised their high birth, which was important, as were royal favour and the respect of one’s peers.69 Although Bagaudano and Faquilona would have lived a privileged lifestyle, it is notable that they do not seem to have discharged public office, enjoyed royal favour, claimed illustrious heritage or donated to the Church. For these reasons, however pronounced their de facto elite status, they are still best described as successful social climbers, ambitious ne’er-do-wells whose very proximity to the village world and its ways of life allowed them to rise above it, armed with local knowledge and ever increasing kudos, changing the contours of their society in the process. Their sons also played important roles in the attempted consolidation of the family’s status. During Opila’s abbacy San Martín’s patrimony grew at an impressive rate, with the monastery receiving some fifteen donations between 945 and 964.70 Opila’s activity seems to correspond with a phenomenon that is easily identifiable in a number of cases from across medieval Europe, in which a rich local family and a network of clients established direct links with a monastery or church – links often cemented by placing one of their own at the helm. This strategy of union between leading family and local monastery had unsurprising results in most cases: as Escalona has pointed out, the oratores

The first reference to San Martín de Turieno is found in T5 (828). On elites see Innes, State and society, 82–5, and T. Reuter (ed.), The medieval nobility: studies on the ruling class of France and Germany from the sixth to the twelfth century, Amsterdam 1998. 70 Opila became abbot there between 942 and 945. This is known because he was named abbot in T49 (945) (‘abbate meo Hopila’), but was clearly still a monk at San Martín in 942, as his presence is attested in T48, in which we see him listed amongst other monks and an abbot named Gonzalo. The donations to San Martín (and sometimes, explicitly, to Opila too) are: T49 (945); T50 (946); T51 (946); T52 (947); T53 (950); T54 (951); T55 (952); T56 (959); T58 (961); T60 (961); T61 (962); T63 (962); T67 (963); T68 (963); and T70 (964). 68 69

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Year

914 915 916 918 920 921 921 925 927 927 930 930 932 915–32

Number of charter

18 21 23 25 26 27 28 32 35 36 39 40 41 42

Mieses Padriñana Padriñana Padriñana Otero Turieno Cosgaya, Baró, Congarna Asturias Unspecified Padriñana Cosgaya Cosgaya Turieno Padriñana

Place

✓

✓ ✓ ✓

✓

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

Purchases

✓

Donations (received)

Table 1.  The transactions of Bagaudano and Faquilona. Exchanges

✓

✓

Other

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more often than not proved to be adept at managing estates too, with the result that many monasteries went on to become hugely wealthy institutions, some of them for centuries.71 But in the case of San Martín, simply developing a secure portfolio of landed holdings and gaining sufficient momentum to cement the monastery’s position beyond one generation was enough of a challenge. After all, as far as we know, the monastery was only sporadically involved in property deals before Opila became abbot, and it had no discernible links with Bagaudano and Faquilona. Conspicuous by their scarcity are donations made to San Martín before Opila’s abbacy – precisely the sort of documents that the monastery would have kept.72 It fell to Opila, therefore, to find ways to consolidate the wealth and prestige of his family and to associate this successfully with San Martín. And here was the challenge that the family faced: in an area of fluid social relations, with a spirited and independent peasantry free from lordly constraints, simply forming this union with the monastery was only half the job. The local community still had to be enticed into taking notice of it, and, furthermore, donating to it. Some members of society needed no invitation to do so. Savarico and Vistrilli (the son and daughter, respectively, of Bagaudano and Faquilona and Munio and Gulatrudia) were evidently important landowners in the tenthcentury Liébana, as one would expect given the wealth of their parents, and they donated separately and together to Opila and San Martín, often making very generous gifts. In 947, for example, Savarico gave to his brother and San Martín a wide range of goods in Cosgaya.73 Three years later, Vistrilli made a donation to Opila and San Martín of a fifth of all that she owned in five villages.74 Savarico and Vistrilli’s support, welcome as it no doubt was, was none the less to be expected. But Opila would need to appeal beyond his immediate family if the monastery was to dominate the valley, as was surely the family’s intention by this stage.75 This dominance, if indeed it ever materialised, was fleeting. Although San Martín probably became the richest corporate entity in the Liébana within a very few years of Opila becoming abbot, it did not in the latter half of the Escalona, ‘Early Castilian peasantry’, 131. There are just two tenth-century examples of donations to San Martín before Opila became abbot. The language used in the first of these, T44 (940), is suffused with an unusual religious fervour, suggesting that the donor was himself a man of the Church. T45 (941) is a charter of donation drawn up at the instigation of Sindino, the son of Count Alfonso. 73 ‘quantum uisus sum abere, terras, uineas, pomiferos, utensilia, montibus, casas, orreos, tam mobile quam eciam et inmobile’ in Cosgaya’: T52. 74 T53. 75 Savarico and Vistrilli first appear together in a document in T64 (962). Vistrilli may have been married previously to Vermudo Hañiz, who made two large-scale donations to San Martín de Turieno in 946; in T50 Vistrilli appears amongst the confirmers of the charter (‘Vistrilli confirmans’), although it is not specified that she is his wife. However, in T51, amongst those confirming the act appears a certain Guestrilli (‘Guestrilli uxor mea confirmans’), clearly the same person. 71

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tenth century manage to reach peasant society as Bagaudano and Faquilona had once done. The vast majority of the donations that San Martín received in the middle third of the tenth century were quite clearly from the valley’s richest landowning families. Diego Muñoz, the son of Munio and Gulatrudia, made two donations to San Martín, in 963 and 964, which attest to his privileged status; some years beforehand, he had been asked to witness donations made by other rich landowners, including one by his sister Vistrilli.76 Significantly, the richer members of this society were beginning to see the importance of the legitimation of their status, and that of their peers, by acting in cooperation and creating group cohesion; for example, having confirmed donations himself, Diego Muñoz’s donation to San Martín was endorsed by Savarico and Vermudo Adefonsez, the son of a count.77 Clearly a figure of some importance, Vermudo Adefonsez forged links with San Martín and its associated family groups, witnessing for and donating to the monastery.78 He also courted the support of the family of Savarico and Vistrilli in a ‘private’ and non-institutional context, donating a vineyard to them in 969, albeit with the stipulation that they leave it to San Martín when they die.79 This was only to be expected, since Vermudo’s family had at some indeterminable stage forged wider links of family kinship with either Savarico or Vistrilli, whom he addressed as his cousins in 963.80 Thus, the charters allow us to see that denser networks of interrelations were forming at the top of Liébana society by this time, and that these richer elements were, overwhelmingly, the agents of donation. Indeed, other donors about whom we know much less were also very wealthy: Cesabo gave three churches to San Martín in 952; similarly, Vermudo Hañiz made two big donations to Opila’s monastery in 946, one of which included the church of San Pedro and San Pablo de Quiviesa by the river Deva.81 But a dozen or so substantial donations from the family group of the monastery’s abbot could not alone sustain the momentum that San Martín briefly enjoyed during the major phase of giving that took place in the middle decades of the tenth century. Throughout this period of growth a close inspection of 76 For his donations see T67 (963) and T70 (964). For confirming donations, ‘Didaco Moniz confirmans’: T54 (951); ‘Didaco Munoz’: T55 (952); ‘Didacus Munuizi’: T60 (961). It has been convincingly argued that this Diego Muñoz was not the same Diego Muñoz who was in the 930s and 940s a prominent figure in the king’s retinue and count of Saldaña. A detailed investigation has shown the different genealogies of these individuals: Montenegro Valentín, Santa María de Piasca: estudio de un territorio, 162–73; cf. her ‘En torno a los orígenes familiares de Diego Muñoz, el primer conde de Saldaña’, in Actas del primer congreso de historia de Palencia: Castilla de Monzón de Campos, 3–5 Diciembre, 1985, Palencia 1987, ii. 339–52. 77 ‘Sabaricus Bacaudaniz’ and ‘Vermudus Adefonsit’: T67 (963). 78 In the capacity of a witness or signatory in T55 (952). His donation to San Martín de Turieno was memorialised in T60 (961). 79 T69. 80 ‘tibi Sauarigus et uxori tua Vistrilli, qui estis mei sobrini’: T67. 81 Cesabo’s donation is T55 (952); Vermudo Hañiz’s donations T50 and T51.

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the charters actually reveals that the wider community gave the monastery a wide berth, neither donating to San Martín nor even selling to it in substantial numbers after Opila became abbot, a pattern that was not to change until after the period covered in this book.82 Between 1000 and 1031, only one donation to the monastery survives in the record, and this is also the work of a rich individual who gives San Martín an entire church.83 Donors in the tenth-century Liébana were invariably not ordinary members of peasant society, but richer elements looking to make manifest their largesse and to ensure comfort in the afterlife. Matthew Innes has described gifts of this sort as ‘“total occasions”’, in which ‘social, legal and spiritual factors were simultaneously operative’; these ‘total occasions’ were precisely what the family group of Opila were engaged in in the middle of the tenth century.84 Such gifts stabilised social mechanisms designed to consolidate group coherence among the rich. One manifestation of this broader process can be seen via an interesting phase in scribal practice in the valley. In the late 940s, coincident more or less with the beginnings of Opila’s stewardship of San Martín and the wave of elite donations to that monastery, a diplomatic style emerges in the charters of a handful of well-connected individuals, all of whom belonged to the two or three major families of the Liébana.85 Variations on the stock phrase ‘me comendo servire’ (‘I commit myself to serve’) occur in several charters, always involving these few important locals, and always in relation to donations that they had made to San Martín. Given the status of those giving, this clearly does not signal a relationship of commendation, but the expression of the consolidation of social ties between the members of a group wishing to see their pre-eminence reflected in documents. This cycle of growth, almost entirely predicated upon elite donation, could not go on indefinitely, especially if the monastery could not draw the interest of non-elite donors, which it singularly failed to do. Some individuals clearly gained spiritual solace from the idea of giving themselves over to San Martín and the religious life, but by and large small owners simply did not donate to the monastery in the tenth century.86 Religious motivations were not necessarily as significant a factor in inspiring peasant donation as is often argued,

T61 (962) sees Deutrio enter the monastic community at San Martín, gifting them a fifth of his property as he did so. All other donations from 945 to 964 are of multiple estates and thus do not appear to be peasant donations; most of these are made by the wider family group of Opila. Three small-scale donations, T72 (967), T73 (975) and T74 (977), appear to be made by peasants. Each is a very short and laconic document, in which a modest donation is made to a priest named Vermudo (whose church is not mentioned). The land transacted in these donations clearly made its way into San Martín’s portfolio at some stage. 83 T81 (1015). 84 Innes, State and society, 17. 85 Examples are T51 (946); T52 (947); and T54 (951). 86 For individuals entering the monastic community see T56 (959); T61 (962); and T63 (962). 82

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and we should not automatically assume that peasants would have been moved to donate for economic reasons either, since the scale of the landed assault on them in this valley had not been such that they lived in fear of the loss of their own status as landowners. At this juncture, the social composition of the Liébana was such that peasants did not need the monastery as much as it needed them, and this assistance (in the form of donation) was not forthcoming. This small world had indeed changed in the space of a generation, but not as might have been expected; peasants had for a time done business with Bagaudano and Faquilona, but they would not simply give away their assets to a monastery which was effectively an extension of that family’s patrimony. Conversely, in spite of its connections with rich local families, the monastery lost considerable momentum after Opila’s death, and the family seems to have fallen away as quickly as it had emerged in the first third of the century. After Opila’s last documented appearance as abbot in 964, San Martín seems to have been involved in very few transactions before the year 1000.87 Only seven texts have survived for this period, which represents a full third of the tenth century, suggesting that San Martín’s initial inroads into Liébana society had been heavily indebted to the impetus that the monastery’s association with Opila’s family had given it.88 These seven documents record what were for the most part minor deals, and it is significant that three of them were directed to a local priest, Vermudo, not San Martín.89 Throughout the period between 900 and 1031, there is no substantial change either with regard to the geographical range of San Martín’s assets; it owned and operated overwhelmingly in the Liébana and very little outside of it, its landed holdings being mostly restricted to the Valdebaró. In some ways the link between Opila and San Martín can be said to represent the corporate embodiment of a new type of union between local family and monastery, which is a familiar story in much of early medieval Europe, but the effects on social stratification in the Liébana were minimal because the region’s leading families never succeeded in inspiring the co­operation of the peasantry on any meaningful scale. The seigneurial class – the señorío of the historiography – did not emerge triumphant on the coat-tails of Bagaudano and Faquilona’s purchasing campaign and the family’s subsequent union with a monastic house, as is often argued to have occurred in other contexts; in the Liébana the señorío is nowhere to be seen before 1031, and the family that might have catalysed this process simply vanished. To characterise all of these changes is no easy task. By and large, the tenthcentury charters present us with a peasant world which seems to have been relatively dynamic, but not because of this inherently unstable. For the most part it was peopled by a range of landowners, the majority of whom owned quite For Opila’s last documented appearance see T70. These are T71 (966); T72 (967); T73 (975); T74 (977); T75 (980); T76 (990); and T77 (990–9). 89 T72, T73 and T74 were all very small deals (two donations and one exchange) involving no more than one vineyard on any of the three occasions. 87

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small properties and yet rubbed shoulders with richer people too. The upshot is that the differences of degree and nuance which characterised the varying scale of assets enjoyed by the small family groups of the village community need to be appreciated. Villagers relied on self-sufficiency and the help of their neighbours to get by, and this must have been true long before we begin to see the effective workings of these relationships described in the charters.90 There is no indication, though, as the historiography generally assumes, that village-level existence was significantly harder in 975, when our pre-1000 documents effectively stop, than it had been in 875, the date of the only clear case of commendation before 1031.91 Indeed, there is little sign of small-scale proprietors actively seeking the formal protection that exclusive, committed dependence might have given them, or even of them relying on schemes of rural credit, as there is elsewhere in northern Spain. Evidence for the regular payment of rent and contracted farming is extremely thin on the ground, and although many Lebaniegos must have been tenants, this group resists easy identification in the sources. Others were perhaps not so lucky; but a servile element is only very dimly visible, and it is the range of landowners which remains the most striking aspect of local society in the tenth-century sources. Peasants in fact more or less drop out of the documents from the middle of the tenth century, but this is not a matter of drastic social change and does not represent their subjection. They reappear in the mid-eleventh century, buying and selling as they once had, which indicates that they were in the tenth century largely able to avoid a newly emboldened landowning stratum represented by a family group with which they did business when it suited their interests to do so. By the 940s, more wary of the family’s motives, and unencumbered by ties of dependence, the peasantry looked to its own interests, with disastrous consequences for Opila’s family once the initial wave of elite donations to San Martín came to an end. The family group of Bagaudano and Faquilona demonstrates that village elites could be made or consolidated in this period, so flexible was the market of land transactions and so unstructured was village society. It is also worth considering for a moment just how unstructured at the institutional level village communities seem to have been in the tenth-century Liébana. There is scant indication, in fact, that these communities had quasi self-regulatory bodies of prominent men who met to debate legal cases or anything of the sort, such as the concilia which occur occasionally in the documentation for other parts of northern Spain.92 Again, when placed in a comparative frame ‘Neighbours, above all, mattered: they were the authorities, often the only authorities, as to which land belonged to whom, or – most importantly – where its bounds actually lay’: Wickham, ‘Rural society’, 526. 91 ‘La solidez de las formulas feudales es ya en este siglo patente’: García de Cortázar and Díez Herrera, La formación de la sociedad hispano-cristiana, 88. 92 The ‘concilia’ mentioned in T78 (1001) clearly does not involve leading men from major families: Pastor de Togneri, Resistencias y luchas campesinas, 28–9. 90

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of reference, in this instance with ninth-century Brittany, one is struck by just how well-structured life in the Breton villages (plebes in their terminology) seems to have been. There is no comparative village-level figure of authority in the tenth-century Liébana, no person or persons who seem to have shared the responsibilities of the machtierns of Brittany, delineated by Davies as the leading figures at village gatherings: village-level assembly was hardly a feature of local society at all.93 Local political authority, insofar as it depended upon public structures, forms part of the analysis of the next chapter, but it is apposite to add here that it must have overwhelmingly resided on a day-to-day basis with the family members of the powerful and wealthy, such as Savarico and Vistrilli, and also with local priests, monks and abbots. Hierarchies within the nucleus of the village may therefore have been subject to the petty squabbles of local people, which for the most part went on without regulation; but these loose structures were precisely what gave society its characteristic dynamism in this period. The seeds of change The creation of Bagaudano and Faquilona’s, and San Martín’s, large property portfolio was not without significance. Logically, the more Bagaudano and Faquilona – and, later, San Martín – owned, the less there was for smaller elements of society to own, although even this could be mitigated to some degree by bringing more land into cultivation. Nevertheless, on the whole peasants had less to barter with in the wake of Bagaudano and Faquilona’s activity, as the cumulative pool of land that had hitherto belonged to the peasant level of society, carved up into portions of differing size and probably changing hands relatively frequently, saw its total volume progressively decrease. This did not necessarily, in the tenth and early eleventh century at least, lead to a rupture in the social fabric, and peasant recourse to the richest members of society did not significantly expand in this period. Indeed, the creation of ties of more formal patronage than the informal associations between people of unequal means which are detailed in the charters, and which have, it bears repeating, characterised many human societies, may simply not have been necessary; ambitious and ruthless families could make themselves rich without having to resort to these tactics, and peasants, by and large, may not have needed to search for assistance beyond the village community. This is, then, a question of a slowly tilting balance; it is one of slow-burning change, a world away from the stock images associated with feudal revolution. The documents demonstrate that the connection established between Opila and San Martín coincided with a spate of donation which made the monastery, in all probability, the biggest landowner in the Liébana from that time. How For machtierns see Davies, Small worlds, 63–5.

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this happened is clear enough. From the 940s, the early cycle of peasant sales to Opila’s family seems to have given way to a tendency for Opila’s family to enrich their monastery by means of aristocratic donation. The monastery, after all, could offer spiritual support and a more extensive, physically rooted, network of patrons, to rich and poor alike. But it was not peasant society at the village level, the owner of one or two fields and perhaps half an orchard, that interacted on a consistent basis with San Martín after about 940. Rather, donation was by and large the work of the richer elements of society, attempting to solidify inter-familial links and, perhaps, to avoid the problems that division of family property might have caused. As for the profile of Bagaudano and Faquilona’s family, this clearly became progressively more ‘aristocratic’ throughout the tenth century, from one generation to the next, as its members married into other rich families; indeed, Bagaudano and Faquilona’s cycle of purchase paved the way for something altogether grander by the time that their son became abbot of San Martín c. 943. But being aristocratic in a landscape which still seems to have been relatively fragmented brought its own challenges: peasants were not sufficiently subdued, their options not sufficiently limited, for them to have to participate in meaningful numbers in the cycle of donations. That this is a mirage contingent upon evidential survival is highly unlikely; peasant donations were precisely the sort of documents that it was in the interests of monasteries to keep. Thus, Bagaudano and Faquilona were a de facto landowning elite in the sense that they owned on a scale which was beyond most of their fellow Lebaniegos, but this did not stop the momentum of their family waning after one generation. This must say something about the fluidity of social structures regardless of its implications for the personalities of the individuals involved. The upshot is that the social and economic framework within which peasants operated in the tenth-century Liébana was not much expanded by the alliance of the Bagaudano-Faquilona family group with San Martín, because peasants, who stood to gain very little from donation, seem to have preferred the element of exchange that characterised the compra-venta. Thus, where and when they thought it in their interests, they sold their assets to Bagaudano and Faquilona, but it made little sense for them to reduce the sum total of their private assets until the monastery was also able to offer protection and patronage the like of which they could not obtain from the village community. This continued into the eleventh century, it would seem, given the scarcity of any sort of documents from the first third of that century. Furthermore, in the absence of developed mechanisms of elite coercion – the castles and arbitrarily imposed rents of the feudal revolution paradigm – the family of Bagaudano, Faquilona and Opila lost momentum so quickly once the grand cycle of donations made to them by other elite families came to an end, that it was their time that was up, not that of a largely free peasantry. There was a ceiling to how rich one could be in the Liébana, and it seems to have been reached by Opila before seigneurial developments saw the influence that went along with this wealth transmute into a very different sort of power, 95

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well after 1050. The implications of this analysis are such that it is not possible to continue to paint a schematic and imprecise picture of feudal change in the tenth- and early eleventh-century Liébana. Social power in the local ambit derived principally from owning land, not people, and there was, as a general rule, no extension in the non-domanial rights that the rich enjoyed over their less affluent neighbours. Village notables with dependent tenants, free tenants, some servile elements, and very many small to medium landowners jostled for position in a far from static world.94 To claim otherwise is to underestimate the range of peasant activity in this century and to mischaracterise tenth-century socio-economic development in this well-documented mountain valley.

94 The observation of Innes on the middle Rhine valley seems to tally with the Liébana in certain regards: ‘This was not yet a world of territorial power, of rights of command over land that one did not own’: State and society, 93.

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4

Kings, Counts and Courts In 932 Juan and Paterna exchanged a vineyard that they owned in Turieno for another in Basieda, given to them by Bagaudano and Faquilona to complete the deal.1 Bagaudano and Faquilona’s acquisition of a vineyard in Turieno comes as no surprise, and is indeed of a piece with many similar transactions completed by this ambitious couple. Rather more interesting though, is the story of how Bagaudano and Faquilona came to possess the vineyard in Basieda in the first place, which can be reconstructed thanks to the narrative content of the charter. Therein we are told that an individual named Toribio handed over the vineyard to Bagaudano and Faquilona in order to meet a judicial fine. Although it has been seen as such, this was no arbitrary seigneurial imposition: Toribio had hidden his brother – a thief – from justice, and Bagaudano and Faquilona received the fine that this crime was deemed to merit at court. Significantly, although Bagaudano and Faquilona held no public office or honorific title, the judicial procedure was framed very clearly within the context of standard public justice; a decision was reached because ‘the law and the truth’ were uncovered.2 But what sort of justice was this, and who decided what was to be paid as compensation, and to whom? Moreover, was this not more properly the business of the count? This brief vignette brings us face to face with one of the central dilemmas of any study of tenth-century Christian Spain, namely, the role of authority figures and the frameworks within which they operated.3 This chapter will consider these matters afresh, examining how, in what ways, and by whom the Liébana was governed. It will also look at what it was that powerful people seem to have

T41. ‘inuenit eum lex et veritas’. 3 Particularly useful on counts and political structures in Iberia is W. Davies, Windows on justice in northern Iberia, 800–1000, Abingdon 2016, chs i, viii. I thank Professor Davies for allowing me to see significant parts of this book before its publication. For an important example, north-west of León, see M. V. Pérez, ‘Estrategias de alianza y reproducción social en la aristocracia medieval leonesa: los Flaínez (siglos x–xii)’, Mirabilia ix (2009), 89–107. Also vital are W. Davies, ‘Counts in tenth-century Iberia’, in S. Barton and R. Portass (eds), Beyond the Reconquista: constructing and representing social power in medieval Iberia, c. 700–1300, Leiden forthcoming; C. Estepa Díez, ‘La Castilla primitiva (750–931): condes, territorios y villas’, TSP ii (2009), 261–78; and C. Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘Commissa, comitatus, mandationes’, in Studi storici in onore di Ottirono Bertolini, ii, Pisa 1972, 619–55 and ‘Imperantes y potestates en el reino astur-leonés’, CHE xlv–xlvi (1967), 352–73. 1 2

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done in the Liébana, paying particular attention to what their political and social functions tell us about how wider society worked. Public power Public power is a term that causes consternation among early medievalists. This is because it is frequently used without clear definition and has held such a wide range of associations and meanings that it risks complicating rather than clarifying any understanding of medieval politics and society. But if the public sphere is simply understood as that arena of political activity mediated by the king from the ‘centre’, in which functions are delegated to agents who govern by proxy and represent the king’s interests in a variety of ways, then it can be argued that public power existed in early medieval contexts, most clearly in Francia.4 Here, counts ran courts in accordance with established procedural norms and implemented royal decrees, at least in theory.5 These activities formed part of the business of governing under Charlemagne and his successors, and they were recognisably public in character because they emphasised the implementation of standard practice, adherence to the law and structured collective participation. The fact that reality may not have corresponded quite so neatly with this notional system does not alter its public characteristics or intentions. The evidence for Iberia in the post-Visigothic centuries is rather less clearcut. Indeed, the establishment of meaningful contacts between the centre and outlying regions is particularly hard to pinpoint in the case of the Liébana. The late ninth-century Alfonsine chronicles indicate that Asturian kings absorbed the Liébana into their expanding kingdom from the mid-eighth century.6 In addition, even the very earliest charters reflect an awareness of political overlordship in their dating clauses, which habitually make reference to the ruling king of Asturias-León. This, however, arguably tells us more about standard documentary practice than it does of the ability of kings to project their power effectively throughout their kingdom. It is only in the This conception has nothing to do with bourgeois political discussion and its wide– reaching effects on statecraft and ‘private life’ as envisaged by J. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, Berlin 1962. 5 On comital donation and administrative duties see S. Maclean, Kingship and politics in the late ninth century: Charles the Fat and the end of the Carolingian empire, Cambridge 2003, 14–16; cf. West, Feudal revolution, 20–7, in which institutional integration and the role of counts are addressed in an east Frankish context, and J. Nelson, ‘Kingship and royal government’, in McKitterick, New Cambridge medieval history, ii. 381–430 at pp. 410–22. Elsewhere see P. Cammorasano, ‘Le famiglie comitali senesi’, in Formazione e strutture dei ceti dominanti nel medioevo: marchesi, conti e visconti nel regno italico (secc. IX–XII), Rome 1996, 287–95. For many other examples cf. F. Bougard, C. La Rocca and R. Le Jan (eds), Sauver son âme et se perpétuer: transmission du patrimoine et memoire au haut moyen-âge, Rome 2005. 6 Rot., 14; Seb., 14. For an overview see Portass, ‘Contours and contexts’, 391–3. 4

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ninth century that the faintest echo of government begins to be heard. One charter from the first third of the century indicates by implication that between them, the king, the bishop and the count were theoretically responsible for the upkeep of order; another, that the king had given land to some of his supporters in the Liébana.7 A caesura in the evidence then ensues of almost a hundred years before there is any further reference to government. Named counts are also absent from the documentation until well into the tenth century, a situation which is not true of other parts of the peninsula, and there indeed exists important later evidence in support of powerful ninth-century counts operating in Castile.8 Thus, political authority and its workings in the Liébana are shrouded in mystery before 900, for we have no direct evidence that the royal voice that claimed to rule there did so in reality. None the less, it has often been asserted that the political consolidation of territorial gains by kings in the Liébana (and elsewhere) led to an attendant expansion of government, a process which took off in the eighth century, according to the chronicles, before gaining considerable momentum from about 870.9 By the late tenth century, however, this same narrative has it that the potestas publica that underlay Astur-Leonese politics withered in the face of an onslaught led by regional powerbrokers. This, in turn, has been said to have precipitated a crisis of royal government.10 But the idea of a transfer from public to private politics in the Liébana rests upon shaky foundations if the whole of the kingdom and its early development are considered. For one thing, by focusing on the gradual disintegration of central power and the increasing inability of kings to control the periphery, a process thought to go hand-in-hand with the emergence of new, private, expressions of political power, there is the risk of over-generalising what were still relatively complex and diverse political conditions in Iberia at the end of the tenth century.11 Throughout the ninth century successive kings had come ‘et pro temporali iudicia insistente pariet post partem regi, episcopo, vel comite terri’: T5 (828); in T7 (831) a couple donated all they owned ‘de donatione regis’ to the church of Santa María de Baró. 8 A Galician example is Flo28 (818), which names a Count Aloitos in the service of Alfonso ii: ‘et per ordinationem domni Adefonsi principis concessi ego iam nominatus Aloitus’. Roger Collins provides the best summary in English of early Castile and its counts: Caliphs and kings, ch. ix. 9 García de Valdeavellano, Instituciones españolas, chs xx, xxi; A. Ceballos-Escalera, Reyes de León: Ordoño III (951–956), Sancho I (956–966), Ordoño IV (958–959), Ramiro III (966–985), Vermudo II (982–999), Burgos 2000, 35–48; G. Martínez Díez, ‘Las instituciones del reino astur a través de los diplomas (718–910)’, AHDE xxxv (1965), 59–168; Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘Imperantes y potestates’; cf. Isla Frez, Alta edad media, chs vi and vii, which is much more measured. 10 Mínguez Fernández, La España, chs x, xi; ‘Ruptura social’; and ‘Pacto privado feudal y estructura pública en la organización del poder político en la alta edad media’, Res Publica xvii (2007), 59–80. 11 George Molyneaux’s recent reappraisal of the role of royal agents in Anglo-Saxon 7

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into contact with the frontier aristocracies upon whose loyalty and cooperation they would depend in order to achieve some measure of political coherence and stability.12 Expansion into new territories brought more wealth, plus larger and more sophisticated networks of aristocratic patronage, and was probably a significant factor in the creation of a stable and thriving court, first in Oviedo, evidenced by an array of striking ninth-century churches and a palace complex, and then, after about 910, in León, which soon became an active centre of political operations.13 But it did not stop frequent disharmony, both in the first few decades of the kingdom’s existence, and in the later ninth and tenth centuries. There was thus from the outset a straightforwardly militaristic aspect to royal rule, as kings had no option but to send armed supporters into the field to impel regional powers to accept their authority. Allusions in the sources to eighth-century rebellions in the frontier regions, particularly Galicia, probably represent attempts to render royal conquest or the violent intimidation of regional aristocrats more palatable, in accordance with the ideological requisites of the Asturian court.14 Kings could not hope to govern a large and expanding realm by means of personal intervention alone, and, while such intervention happened on occasion, its appearance in the documentary record reflects the fact that royal business was precisely the sort which would have been recorded and kept. Kings relied on eliciting cooperation, but they therefore had to choose between magnate factions, giving preference to some over others. To choose meant to make allies, who mostly revelled in the king’s patronage and the access to wealth that it gave them, but to choose also meant to make enemies.15 Furthermore, favoured supporters may have stayed loyal for a time, but kings had to be wary of over-rewarding them, lest they strike out on their own; on the other hand, not to reward one’s supporters with due generosity was to

England, in which he has made a strong case in favour of a more cautious estimation of the scope of action of ninth- and tenth-century ealdormen, has demonstrated that the assumption of steady, incremental, institutional growth as a natural consequence of stable kingship, needs to be treated with caution: The formation of the English kingdom in the tenth century, Oxford 2015. 12 Collins, ‘Spain’, 278. 13 On the Oviedo buildings see J. D. Dodds, Architecture and ideology in early medieval Spain, London 1990, 27–46; M. Berenguer, ‘Puntualizaciones sobre los edificios ramirenses del Naranco’, AEM viii (1972–3), 395–404; C. García de Castro Valdés, Arqueología cristiana de la alta edad media en Asturias, Oviedo 1995; and C. Sánchez-Albornoz, Una ciudad de la España cristiana hace mil años, Madrid 1965, 57–85. 14 Rot., 16, 18; Seb., 16, 18. See C. Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘Rebeliones en Galicia’, in his Estudios sobre Galicia en la temprana edad media, La Coruña 1981, 159–82. On early rebellions and their meaning see A. Isla Frez, ‘The aristocracy and the monarchy in northwest Iberia between the eighth and eleventh century’, in J. D’Emilio (ed.), Culture and society in medieval Galicia, Leiden 2015, 251–80 at p. 253. 15 Consider, to take a well-known example, the riches lavished upon Hermenegildo Gutiérrez and his family, analysed at length in part ii below.

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risk losing their support. Government, in the most limited sense of securing consensus and establishing a chain of command, was therefore a difficult balancing act contingent upon the creation of solid political ties at the personal level, and at the same time a concerted effort to give the impression that these relationships were held together by a clear set of administrative roles within the king’s gift.16 In León, and probably in Oviedo at an earlier date (although less is known about this), the king relied on a body of court officials, probably modelled on the officium palatinum of Visigothic tradition, of whom the most significant appear to have been the comes palatii, the highest-ranked magnate at court, and the maiordomus, or chief of staff.17 There are, however, reasonable grounds to suspect that kings intensified their relations with the greater magnates of the kingdom in the tenth century; this does not imply an expansion of government in the modern sense of the word, but rather an effort to delegate royal power more comprehensively throughout the kingdom. Although this was a world of limited and ineffective transportation, the transfer of news remained vital; to this end, delegations and regional representatives were summoned to León, and documents record the congregation of councils, at which the news and business of the realm were discussed.18 This activity reflects closer and more complex ties between kings and local aristocracies throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries, not weakening ones. Given that governing necessitated personal contact, oaths of loyalty and the fostering of small groups of trusted advisers, stronger links with regional aristocracies were indispensable, and they were deliberately nurtured as a result. Often, as between Galicia and León, this was achieved by the cultivation of dense networks of patronage, fortified by marriage alliance.19 Kinship bonds therefore extended beyond the royal household, and invitations to form such close alliances with the royal centre would surely have been rarely spurned. But for the king to make any pretence at government beyond León, he was obliged to entrust magnates with considerable decision-making responsibilities, as it was they who would hold courts, safeguard the security of the inhabitants of the regions under their jurisdiction, and, in places, collect tax or tribute for the king.20 Government therefore necessitated the delegation of power to the localities, with all of its attendant risks.

Bloch, Feudal society, ii, chs xxviii, xxx and xxxi. Isla Frez, Alta edad media, 143–6. 18 For assemblies see Cel29 (927), Cel191 (982). 19 See chapter 8 below. 20 Isla Frez, Alta edad media, 130–1. 16 17

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Counts, comitatus, commissa and mandationes Possibly by the late ninth century, and certainly throughout the tenth, the Kingdom of Asturias-León was divided into political and territorial precincts of varying extents known as comitatus, commissos (or commissa) and mandationes, at the head of which, normally, stood one of the kingdom’s greater magnates.21 It seems that there was no single defining pattern which underpinned their creation or designation, and we must avoid conceiving of this rather basic political system in terms of a state superstructure overseeing a network of tidily organised nodes of power: on the contrary, pragmatism and local circumstance gave shape to public command. Public power, traditionally understood, depended in large measure on private acquiescence to its directives. To admit as much is not to expose a flaw in these arrangements, but to describe their reality, and political realism was about the needs of the moment. The importance of local knowledge in the creation of rudimentary systems of government was therefore paramount, which is why new men from the centre very rarely assumed roles in the periphery; these positions fell, rather, to groups of elite local men who were already significant regional landowners. The richest men in these outlying zones were best placed, after all, to utilise their knowledge of the geography – that is, of the location of central places and other rich families, and the whereabouts of good quality land – in order to regulate society. But although it is not possible to make precise distinctions between the meanings of the terms comitatus, commissos and mandationes from the documentation, it remains important to realise that all of these words had to do with an assumption of the exercise of royally delegated power.22 The specific duties for which these royal agents were responsible are hard to determine, but what each powerbroker actually did must in some measure reflect the extent to which he was embedded within the king’s command structure; certainly, regional magnates often presided at law courts, but there is only sparse evidence of their uniform involvement in the collection of dues.23 Sometimes the magnates who discharged these duties were indeed invested with the title of comes (count) in our charters. This was a title of long historical tradition, conspicuously tied to the notion of public service in the Visigothic period.24 Yet a degree of caution is needed at this juncture. Where counts are seen as actors in this period, they 21 There is a full and lively debate on these terms. See, for the classic statement in a Castilian context, C. Estepa Díez, ‘Formación y consolidación del feudalismo en Castilla y León’, in En torno al feudalismo hispánico: primer congreso de estudios medievales, León 1989, 157–256. On Galicia, where public activity is very clear, including the taking of tax, see Isla Frez, Sociedad gallega, 144–51 and, for tax, 151–9. More generally see Isla Frez, Alta edad media, 146–51. 22 For the conferral of these responsibilities onto Galician magnates see part ii below. The later mandamentum receives considerable coverage in Isla Frez, Sociedad gallega, 243–8. 23 Davies, ‘Judges and judging’, passim. 24 On public duty see LV ix. ii. ix.

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often but not always performed public functions; on the other hand, we also see actors performing what seem to be public functions (such as the holding of courts) without explicitly being called count.25 Just what a count was and did is therefore hard to discern, partly because this seems to have varied across the kingdom. ‘Count’ may, in fact, have been closer to an honorific title than an office with clearly defined and unchanging parameters in our period. By way of summary, it can be concluded that counts were wealthy figures of significant standing who sometimes participated in the public government of the kingdom. This participation seems to have increased through the period studied here: from 950 to 1050 counts become more numerous in the documentation, and their role more clearly tied to the royal delegation of power, demonstrating that any emphasis on the disintegration of royal authority is misdirected.26 Thus, although ideal-type public and private conceptions of the organisation and expression of political power should probably not be drawn in such sharp contrast as is often the case, governing structures of a markedly public character – no matter how rudimentary – were well established in parts of northern Spain in the tenth century, and counts were more often than not implicated in them. The first question to be addressed in this chapter, then, is not whether the public character of the Liébana declined around 950 as the dominant model suggests, but whether it had ever been successfully implemented in a region hitherto peripheral to the centre and its reach. Count Alfonso and family In an otherwise unremarkable charter from 924, Count Alfonso and his wife Justa completed an exchange of orchards in Cesaria with Sonna and Citi (‘Sonna et Citi uobis comiti nostro domno Adefonso et uxiri tue Iuste’).27 This is the first example from the Liébana in which a count features as a principal actor in the events relayed in a charter, but it is striking that he was not engaged in what we might consider ‘official business’ of a public sort, but instead a private transaction. This type of transaction was not new for the count; the document, apparently drawn up by Sonna and Citi, informs us that as part of the exchange Alfonso alienated an orchard which he had earlier bought from a certain Asperino (‘Et uos dedisti nobis pumare circa ecclesia Sancti Christofori quem comparastis de Asperino’). The count thus wheeled and dealed in property with his neighbours from time to time, and was proximate enough to local society to transact with it on a private basis. But who made the running here? And what caused such deals to materialise at all? Although ultimately unknowable, it is easy to imagine that Alfonso’s wealth and status For context see Davies, Windows on justice, ch. i. Ibid. 27 T31. 25 26

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made the prospect of doing business with him an enticing one for socially ambitious individuals. He was, after all, a rich man: in 925 he and his wife made a large donation to the church of Santa María de Lebeña, which they had built (‘ecclesia que nos laborauimus’), together with all that they owned in Lebeña and Cesaria. Among the vineyards, orchards and olive groves included in the donation were possessions that had been given to Alfonso by the king and, more intriguingly, ‘palaces with rights of exit and access’.28 These ‘palatios’ may well refer to aristocratic residences of some sort, perhaps a large house and estate.29 In any case, the scale of assets featured in the transaction must surely signal that the count was among the richest members of this society. Given this clear indication of the count’s wealth, and the relatively small stage on which he acted, it is strange that he appears so infrequently in the documentary record.30 Just as puzzling is the fact that despite their chronological overlap in the charter record, evidence of interaction or cooperation between Count Alfonso and Bagaudano and Faquilona is absent from the documents, suggesting that these powerful individuals pursued separate business interests in the tenth century. Nor did they witness each other’s documents, which is all the more striking because the few richest individuals of the Liébana must have been known to each other, given the size of the region. Stranger still is the fact that one of the count’s sons, Vermudo, affirmed in the 960s that he was the nephew of Savarico and Vistrilli, and thus part of the wider family group of Bagaudano and Faquilona; this means that Count Alfonso or Iusta must have been the sibling of either Bagaudano or Faquilona or, more likely, Munio or Gulatrudia.31 In light of these connections, Count Alfonso’s failure to appear in charters with Bagaudano and Faquilona seems even more curious. It is tempting to surmise that Bagaudano and Faquilona chose the church (their son, Opila, becoming abbot at San Martín de Turieno in the 940s), and not proximity to the count, as their route to social advancement. Count Alfonso and his wife do not appear as actors in Liébana charters after 925, although his social standing still carried significant weight for another twenty years or so, as we know from documents that he witnessed or undersigned.32 It is telling too that whenever Alfonso appears in charters he is always ‘ipsos palacios cum suo exitus et regressus et terras et uineas et pumares et oliuares et figares et pumiferos et molinos, siue de donatione regis’: T34. Quite apart from all of the landed assets included in this donation, the count possessed church plate which only the richest can have been able to offer in private donations. 29 It has been suggested that the ‘palaces’ of northern Iberia in this period were places in which rents and various lordly dues were concentrated at the local level: J. Escalona and I. Martín Viso, ‘Los palatia, puntos de centralización de rentas en la meseta del Duero (siglos ix–xi)’, in A. Vigil-Escalera and G. Bianchi, Horrea, barns and silos: storage and incomes in early medieval Europe, Bilbao 2013, 103–26. 30 As an actor, and not simply a witness or signatory: T31 (924); T33 (925); T34 (925). Of these T33 is a highly problematic donation text which has suffered serious interpolation. 31 T67 (963). 32 Thus ‘comite nostro Allefonso’: T45 (941); ‘et comite Allefonso’: T46 (941); ‘Alfonsus 28

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named ‘count’, and on one occasion ‘count of the Liébana’. Yet after 925 he appears merely as a prestigious witness, a man of authority capable of lending ballast to decisions ratified in documents, rather than as a nominal public figure conducting the king’s business (in spite of carrying the comital title). He did not hold court in the Liébana and was not seen at the king’s court. The evidence therefore points in two directions: Alfonso held the comital title, and this clearly gave him great local influence and wealth, but he himself was not an active player in the public politics of the kingdom or its governmental structures in his region. Explaining this contradiction away with reference to lost evidence does not convince, for public courts were running before and during the period of Alfonso’s countship: in 922, just two years before Alfonso’s first appearance in the Liébana charters, public justice in a case concerning the return of land to San Salvador was administered by a series of judges, none of whom bore the comital title. Count Alfonso was not present at all.33 The nature of the count’s power must therefore remain opaque: we do not know whether he had been granted the powers sometimes associated with comitatus, commissos, or mandationes, and the most we can say is that his comital title was associated with the Liébana. Tellingly, not a single document describes the delegation of royal authority to the count, and any links he may have had with the kings in León are not attested, a sure sign of his relatively minor status. True, his regional authority is juxtaposed with the king’s more comprehensive power in dating clauses, but none of this dispels the impression that the count was a marginal figure, certainly not an active participant at the king’s court.34 We therefore need to consider the question of scale: Count Alfonso was a rich and influential person in the Liébana, but a figure of reduced dimensions when seen in the context of the kingdom as a whole. Whatever sort of power he enjoyed, it did not depend upon his personal involvement in judicial procedure and public government – and the fact that he bore a title which is often associated with public justice in other contexts should not blind us to this. So having the comital title did not necessarily make one a conduit for royal authority, and neither did local power automatically lead to supra-local influence.35 Yet the residue of a society habituated to structured legal proceedings, even if coordinated as much by practised custom as by strict adherence to law, refused to disappear entirely. Counts did not run courts in the Liébana, but no matter: some conception of the principle of court procedure, some sense of the public, prevailed, if inconsistently, as records of court cases mediated by comite presens fui’: T50 (946); ‘Adefonsus commite confirmans manus’: P9 (943); ‘comite nostro Adefonso en Leuanensem’: P14 (952). 33 ‘In iudicio Fredenandi, Ranosindi abbatis, Extrulphi presbiter, uel aliorum multorum iudicum’: T30 (922). 34 For example, ‘sub principe Ranemiro rex et comite Allefonso’: T46 (941). 35 Yet T31 (924) is witnessed by a certain Emilianus ‘uicarius de comite’, whom we might assume to be the count’s deputy.

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non-comital authority figures make clear. Social structures had not by this stage crystallised in such a way that the public sphere as it operated in the Liébana corresponded to the public sphere and its workings elsewhere in the kingdom, let alone in the Frankish kingdom, so often held up as the working model. In other words, there was more than one public sphere in early medieval Spain, or at least more than one manifestation of it – indeed, there were several. This much is demonstrated by the charter from 932 in which Bagaudano and Faquilona exchanged a vineyard of theirs in Basieda for one owned by Juan and Paterna in Turieno.36 This document was analysed by Barbero and Vigil, for whom it represented a clear sign of the growing seigneurial power of Bagaudano and Faquilona.37 These historians arrived at their conclusion on the basis of the role that Bagaudano and Faquilona played in the resolution of the crime relayed by the charter. The vineyard in Basieda, given by this rich village couple to Juan and Paterna in 932, had originally been given to Bagaudano and Faquilona by a certain Toribio as a penalty fee on account of the illicit assistance that he had given to his brother. For helping to hide his brother from justice after he had stolen cattle from Egerio, Flacenco and Suinito, Toribio was ordered (presumably by Bagaudano and Faquilona) to pay a fine to the holders of the court.38 But why was it they – the court holders – who received this fine? None of the foregoing suggests that the three peasants from whom Toribio’s brother had stolen were Bagaudano and Faquilona’s dependants, nor that this couple weighed in to grab the spoils, which might more properly have gone to the injured parties. Indeed, wider contextual information shows that this was not a seigneurial imposition but something quite different, since documentation from across northern Spain shows that a characteristic feature of judicial process was that powerful local men could and did receive the profits from ostensibly public procedures.39 In such moments the smooth operation of public arrangements hinged on private involvement, the latter facilitating the order imposed on wider society by the former. Bagaudano and Faquilona’s involvement at court did not therefore represent the encroachment of private interests onto the terrain of standard public court procedures; far from it, there was nothing evasive or untoward about the role that this couple fulfilled, for they not only resolved a dispute but went on to frame it very pointedly in language unambiguously that of public justice (‘inuenit eum lex et ueritas’). The delivery of justice in the tenth century therefore variously depended T41. Barbero and Vigil, La formación del feudalismo, 378–9. 38 ‘et uos dedistis nobis Iohanni et Paterne aliam uiniem in Bosita, quem pariabit uobis Turibius filius Florenci et Teudille, pro eu quod celauit suum germanum ab bodimium qui furtabit illos iiii boues, unum de Egerio, et alium de Flacenco et tercium de Suinito et inuenit eum lex et ueritas et parabit uobis ipsa uinea’: T41. 39 In several Sobrado documents, a payment was made to Count Hermenegildo for his adjudication of a number of criminal cases: Sob21 (931), Sob24 (931), and Sob29 (931); cf. Davies, Acts of giving, 143–9. 36 37

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on the participation of locally important people and individuals bearing titles, sometimes acting together and sometimes apart, often acting in conjunction with persons (mostly invisible to us) who must have been conversant in the law. This task, on at least one occasion, fell to Bagaudano and Faquilona, and this actually makes eminent good sense: they were important local operators, known to be people with the purchase and stature necessary to help regulate their societies. Counts may or may not have run courts in the Liébana at this time, although one would expect some indication of this to have survived in the documentary record had they done so (and there is none from the entire tenth century). Whatever the case may be, it is crucial to realise that the absence of counts at court did not mean that society devolved into feudal chaos, for there were other players willing to step into the breach and ensure the workings of what remained public processes in the eyes of the participants. Legitimate public acts may well have looked different from region to region involving one or several but not necessarily all of the various characteristics that historians today consider ‘public’, including the presence of royal agents, standard procedure and the invocation of written law. The writers of charters seem to have recognised as much (assuming that the cartulary documents are faithful copies), because although their documents sometimes described moments in which figures of influence without honorific titles exercised power, these same scribes developed a standard warning clause that ever more routinely recognised the theoretical power of the count.40 Expanding horizons? Throughout the middle of the tenth century, comital title and the holding of commissos, comitatus and mandationes, although still theoretically subject to the appointment of kings, became increasingly associated with greater magnate families, transmuting into something akin to an hereditary honour across parts of northern Iberia.41 (We shall see in the second half of this book how three generations of one family held comital title, commissos and mandationes in southern Galicia.) Accordingly, the bearing of these titles and honours in certain areas tended to become the hereditary right of magnate families, but this was not the case in the Liébana. Things, as ever, were less straightforward than this. In 959 Count Alfonso’s son Pepi Adefonsez sold a vineyard in the villa of Frama to the priest Adica: he was not called ‘count’ in the body of the charter, Warning clauses mentioning an unspecified count: T45 (941): ‘comes laycus’; cf. variations on ‘comite territorio’ in T50 (946); T56 (959); T60 (961); and T67 (963); cf. also in sanction clauses: ‘et pariat post parte regis uel potestatibus’: T19 (914); ‘aut aliqua potestas’: T58 (961); ‘et si quis homo quislibet comite’: T69 (963); ‘si aliquis homo de potestas aut maiorino uel saionibus’: T77 (990–99). 41 Isla Frez, Alta edad media, 148–9. 40

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but he perhaps made claim to this title when lending his hand to the document (‘Ego Pepi et comite in anc carta quem fieri uolui et relegendo cognoui manus meas’).42 This charter stands alone, however, for Pepi is never again referred to as count in the Liébana charters, and, much like his father Count Alfonso, he did not engage in the sorts of duties which might be expected of a public official. Moreover, a charter from 962 suggests that his involvement in public procedures was very much second-hand and indirect.43 This document records a court settlement made in relation to a dispute brought by the monasteries of San Salvador and San Martín over rights to land. The judge overseeing the conflict was named as Memne ‘qui est iudici de Pepi Adefonsus’. We appear to see, therefore, a judge acting on Pepi’s behalf in a dispute settlement, which certainly suggests some element of established process. But how such an arrangement was authorised is unclear, and the document recording these events is in any case rather surprising, for Pepi did not in 962 make recourse to his comital status (attested by T57) in order to legitimise the involvement of his judge: his name, as a man of great local importance, was likely legitimation enough. In short, local prominence seems to have trumped title when it came to doing public business on the ground in the Liébana, and the implications of this charter are profound, for they fit well with previous findings. A public system of courts functioned perfectly well without the direct personal involvement of figures holding the comital title – this much is supported by the document involving Bagaudano and Faquilona holding court, analysed above, as well as the fact that Alfonso and Pepi never participated directly but through deputies. In a world in which public structures were present yet rudimentary and flexible, the local dimension was as important as the public: everyone knew who Pepi Adefonsez was, and his real status mattered more than comital title. The dimensions and character of ‘the public’ take on a different aspect when these examples are taken into account. By the same token it is necessary to consider what public authority implied in light of the sporadic appearance of Fernán González, count of Castile (c. 930-c. 970) and a figure of totemic importance in Spanish historiography, in the dating clauses of the Liébana documents.44 Castile is just over the mountains to the south-east of the Liébana; all the same, there are no grounds for imagining that the Castilian count held authority over the Liébana in the tenth century, for he is not once an actor in the charters, even if his political profile must have been grand indeed to warrant his being named in them. None the less, it is worth stressing that Fernán González’s appearances in the dating clauses of Liébana documents – all Piasca charters – see him associated with the king in León; not a single document makes reference to the count of Castile alone in the dating T57. T62. 44 J. Pérez de Urbel, Fernán González: el héroe que hizo a Castilla, Buenos Aires 1952. 42 43

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clause, whereas other documents do see the king’s sole authority explicitly recognised.45 In fact Fernán González appears in formulations which merely reflect his role as count of Castile, demonstrating his political influence in the high politics of the kingdom at this time, rather than direct control of the Liébana.46 Moreover, during this same period, other Piasca documents specifically name two different personages as ‘count in Liébana’, a much more precise designation likely to reflect those who held genuine influence on the ground.47 One of the two verifiable counts of the Liébana to overlap chronologically with Fernán González’s period of political prominence in Castile was of course Count Alfonso. The other, Fernando Rodríguez, seems to have held authority in the Liébana in the 960s, presumably after Alfonso’s death. Although little can be said about Count Fernando Rodríguez’s actions in the Liébana, it is clear that he was physically present in the region at least once, because one of the two references to him from the Liébana charters shows him confirming a donation of Vermudo Adefonsez, Count Alfonso’s other son. The fact that this latter is never once associated with the comital title indicates that comital status did not automatically pass to the children of counts in hereditary fashion, and that relative status in this instance might provide further explicatory context. Vermudo was clearly a less significant figure than Fernando Rodríguez, who was one of the great magnates of the kingdom, and whose countship was specifically tied to the Liébana in the language of the charters (‘comis … terra libanensi’).48 Fernando Rodríguez’s assumption of the comital title in the Liébana indeed heralded a change of policy on the part of kings who had hitherto been content to focus their energies elsewhere; the Liébana, after all, was difficult to reach and cut off by mountains from court politics in and around León. Left to the devices of locally rich men such as Count Alfonso, the Liébana remained on the fringes of the area under royal command. An attempt was made to alter this circumstance, however. For one thing documents from the 960s and 970s seem to manifest a concern on the part of both Sancho i and his son Ramiro iii to draw the Liébana closer within the network of regions that were nominally run by magnates sympathetic to the

Fernán González appears in dating clauses in Liébana documents: in P7 (933): ‘Regenante domno Rademiro in Legione. Fredenando Gontesalbes comite in Kastela’; in P15 (957): ‘Sub Sanzioni rex in Legione et comite Fredenando in Kastella’; and in P17 (962): ‘Regnante rege Sanzo in Leion et comite Fredenando Gondesalbez’. 46 Montenegro Valentín, Santa María de Piasca: estudio de un territorio, 158–9. 47 ‘Regnante principe nostro Ordonius in Legione et comite nostro Adefonso in Leuanensem’: P14 (952); ‘Regnante rex Sanctius in Legione et comis Fredenandus Ruderiz terra libanensi’: P18 (966). 48 ‘et comite Fredenando Roderici in Lebana confirmabit istum testamentum de Vermudo Adefonsiz’: T60 (961); ‘comis Fredenandus Ruderiz terra libanensi’: P18 (966). 45

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causes of these kings.49 This much is suggested by the fact that all those who claimed comital title in the Liébana between 960 and 1000 were the king’s men to varying extents, all imposed upon the region from beyond its borders. Count Fernando Rodríguez certainly seems to have been an outsider. He had no traceable family, property or links in the Liébana, whereas, on the other hand, he was a trusted lieutenant of Sancho i (956–66), firmly entrenched amongst the king’s most senior palatine supporters; his name appears on many royal diplomas and he was clearly a political operator on a scale that far outstripped the previous holders of comital office.50 A failsafe context for Fernando Rodríguez’s elevation to the countship of the Liébana cannot be provided, but it is beyond doubt that Sancho i’s reign was turbulent, and it is conceivable that the assumption of the comital title in the Liébana by one of his close allies offered stability at a time when the political geography of the kingdom was becoming increasingly complicated, thanks mostly to a resurgent al-Andalus and ever more powerful marcher lords.51 Indeed, although itself peripheral to the royal court, the Liébana lay just to the north of a region that was home to a kin group that was coming to exert considerable political influence by the middle third of the tenth century. This area, Palencia and the Tierra de Campos, extends east across the Meseta from León, skirting the southern boundaries of Liébana in its northern extremities and covering a significant part of the vast central plain, bound by Castile to its east.52 The group was the Banu-Gómez, a leading family associated with the countship of Saldaña (Palencia) and Carrión (Palencia). In or before 977 the Banu-Gómez took comital title in the Liébana too.53 A traditional argument held that this family descended from Diego Muñoz, the son of Munio and Gulatrudia, but it has now been convincingly shown via detailed

49 Sancho i was murdered by the Galician-Portuguese magnate Gonzalo Menéndez, which is recounted in Sampiro, 27 at pp. 338–9. In general terms, this further inflamed a rivalry between Galician and Portuguese magnates and their Leonese and Castilian counterparts, which led to what was effectively a civil war between the preferred candidates of these two factions, Vermudo ii (king in Galicia from 982) and Ramiro iii, respectively; this war was eventually decided in favour of Vermudo ii, who was king of León from 984 to 999. 50 PMH92 (966); Sahagún175, 176 (960). 51 Ceballos-Escalera, Reyes de León, 129–57. 52 The best guide remains P. Martínez Sopena, La Tierra de Campos occidental: poblamiento, poder y comunidad del siglo x al xiii, Valladolid 1985. On the heartlands of the Banu-Gómez see A. Carvajal Castro, ‘Superar la frontera: mecanismos de integración territorial entre el Cea y el Pisuerga en el siglo x’, AEM xlii (2012), 601–28. 53 On the Banu-Gómez see M. Torres Sevilla Quiñones de León, Linajes nobiliarios en León y Castilla (siglos ix–xiii), Valladolid 1999, 236–74. Montenegro Valentin also demonstrates that attempts to trace the Banu-Gómez’s comital authority in the Liébana back to 966 rests on dubious foundations: Santa María de Piasca: estudio de un territorio, 173–4. Added to this, in any case, is the fact that we know that Fernando Rodríguez was count in 966: ‘comis Fredenandus Ruderiz terra libanensi’: P18 (966).

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prosopographical study that the Banu-Gómez’s origins were not to be found in the Liébana, and that their dealings in the region began with Gómez Díaz.54 The Banu-Gómez were heavily implicated in the politics of the kingdom, variously allying with and rebelling against the kings of León in the tenth and early eleventh centuries; their links with the counts of Castile were also well established. Gómez Díaz, the first of the line to hold comital title in the Liébana as well as Saldaña, was consistently involved in court politics throughout the 960s and the early 970s.55 Yet the personal intervention of the new count in the Liébana appears to have been insubstantial: although he was count of the Liébana from at least 977, neither he nor his successor Garcia Gómez (count from sometime between 981 and 990 to at least 1001) actively partook in the government of the region on an important scale in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, suggesting that the centre of the family’s operations remained the Meseta, where their activities are well documented.56 Gómez Díaz appears as count of the Liébana in the dating clauses of a handful of documents in the last quarter of the tenth century, but he, like his predecessors, is not seen holding court or conducting the business of the realm in this region.57 This may have owed much to wider political circumstances related to the minority of Ramiro iii, which likely kept Gómez Díaz away from the region for much of the time, a situation well documented by the evidence.58 The serious politics of the kingdom, it would seem, simply happened elsewhere. It was none the less useful for the royal dynasty, led by a member of the Ansúrez family (close allies of the Banu-Gómez) during Ramiro iii’s minority, to have powerful supporters in place throughout the kingdom. This is the context that explains the appearance of the Banu-Gómez in the Liébana in the charter record, and it might also explain the construction of the castle of Subiedes, which has been dated, thanks to C14 analysis. to the period 980 to 1020.59 Gómez Díaz was followed as count by his son, García Gómez, whose comital status is better attested in the corpus of Liébana charters.60 An ambitious For the non-Lebaniego origins of the family see Montenegro Valentín, Santa María de Piasca: estudio de un territorio, 162–73, cf. her ‘En torno a los orígenes familiares de Diego Muñoz’, 339–52. 55 Gómez Díaz was a royal favourite under Sancho i, witnessing two documents in 960, Sahagún175 and Sahagún176. In 971 he was a senior magnate, appearing amongst the supporters of Ramiro iii (966–85), in Sahagún261. 56 Torres Sevilla, Linajes nobiliarios, 247–54. 57 ‘comite Gomizi Didaz in Libana’: P19 (977): ‘commite Gomez Diaz in Rium de Carrione etiam et in lebanense’: P20 (979); ‘comite Gomez Didaz terre lebanense’: P23 (981). 58 Montenegro Valentín, Santa María de Piasca: estudio de un territorio, 181–3. 59 This is discussed in much greater detail ibid. 180–1. See also Marcos Martínez and Mantecón Callejo, ‘El castillo del monte Subiedes’, 113. 60 ‘sub rege Uermudo et comite Garcias Gomet in Leuana’: T76 (990); ‘sub principe rex Allefonsiz [Alfonso v] et comite Garsea Gomiz in Leuana’: T78 (1001); ‘Regnit Adefonsiz in Legione, comite Garcia Gomici in Sallania’: T79 (1001); ‘sub rex Allefonsi et comite Garsia 54

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schemer, frequently at odds with the western (Galician and Portuguese) power bloc that emerged in support of the new king, Vermudo ii, his assumption of the comital title seems not to have translated into a more robust public presence in the Liébana.61 Not once is the count seen at court there; not once is he seen exercising any power associated with the commissa or mandationes. It is little surprise, given his machinations against Vermudo ii, that three of the five Liébana charters in which García Gómez features ratified deals produced in the subsequent reign of Alfonso v (999–1028). Indeed, the impression remains that the Liébana continued to be a secondary concern for important magnates in the second half of the tenth century, and it would be possible to deduce from the lack of documents spanning the first third of the eleventh century (allowing for all the usual caveats) that this was true after 1000 too. For if royal strategy had been to shore up the kingdom’s hitherto ephemeral control of the region by backing powerful regional magnates as governors in the Liébana after about 960, this strategy backfired during the countship of García Gómez, whose seditious activities may have further hindered the effective establishment of anything approaching practical and consistent central delegation in the Liébana. How, then, are these changes to be assessed? One way is to reconceive of the public sphere, as well as the nature of politics, throughout the tenth century. Local players like Count Alfonso enjoyed wealth and prestige, but whether they ran the public affairs of society is harder to say. Crucially, though, the same is true of relative newcomers, that is, individuals whose impressive stature in the politics of the kingdom was not matched by their relatively limited ties to, and proprietorial interest in, the Liébana. The counts Fernando Rodríguez, Gómez Díaz and García Gómez were all men of the crown in a narrow sense (although they certainly displayed differing levels of loyalty to kings), but it seems that the Liébana was a political playground in which their ambitions could not be realised. Elusive references from mid-century to deputies at court suggest that an understanding of the principle of judicial process was not wholly absent; on the other hand, identifying the individuals who presided at court remains largely beyond us. Thus, whether the reach of the centre actually underwent consolidation in the Liébana in the period between 950 and 1031 is far from certain, in spite of the continued nominal presence of royal allies in the region, and it is tempting to imagine that local players, the likes of Bagaudano, Faquilona and their children, saw to the day-to-day management of the affairs of a buoyant Gomet in Leuana’: T80 (1001); ‘regnante rex Bermudo in Legione et comite Garcia Gomiz in Liuana’: P25 (997). 61 García Gómez’s loyalty to Vermudo ii was far from constant and he was involved in a catalogue of intrigues and revolts against the king. For a detailed account see M. Torres Sevilla, ‘Un rebelde en la corte de Vermudo ii: García Gómez, conde de Saldaña (h. 950–1015)’, in M. Calleja González, Actas del tercer congreso de historia de Palencia: 30, 31 de marzo y 1 de abril, 1995, Palencia 1995, 693–704.

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and varied community of peasant farmers who neither felt the chill wind of an oppressive central power nor cowered in the face of justice delivered at the tip of a sword. The public, in the most basic sense, meant the business and affairs of the community, and there were many individuals, some titled, perhaps more who were not, able to regulate these matters. The most apposite way of demonstrating this reality is by turning finally to a document from 962. In this year, it was Bagaudano and Faquilona’s son Opila who seemed to represent some sort of public authority in the eyes of a local community still overwhelmingly defined by the fluid dynamism of its social structures.62 In 962 the abbot oversaw a complicated multi-stage dispute between Sisecuto and Fernando over the ownership of a vineyard in Mus which had more of the ‘public’ about it than any of the actions undertaken by the various people invested with the comital title throughout the century. Accompanied by an important retinue, and aided by court officers called, as in all public courts, saiones, Opila passed judgement ‘with his own hand’.63 Comital authority was not required for justice to be served. What matters though is to recognise that the who of this question is less important than the how. For it is clear that these societies used, manipulated and above all confided in long-standing traditions of structured court proceedings as a means of selfregulation. Part Visigothic inheritance, part adherence to customary practice, it was not just the actors, but also the size of the stage, that determined who ran courts and held genuine influence in the small worlds of tenth-century Spain.64 The essential dynamism of these worlds ties together the findings presented in the first half of this book. When close analysis of the actions, motives and associations of peasants is undertaken, and some measure of agency afforded these people as families and individuals, an increased understanding of how these societies as a whole functioned and developed is possible: in particular it is clear that the peasantry was far removed from the staid caricature divined from the sources in much of the scholarship. Diverse and imaginative strategies for gaining advantage or preferment were put into practice by peasants. The loose ties of the client network, the assistance sought from and given to friends and neighbours, and the thoughtful consolidation or alienation of landed holdings, featured prominently among these strategies. Furthermore, a genuine impulse towards improving one’s lot can be detected in the purchasing campaign of Bagaudano and Faquilona, as it can too in the transactions undertaken by other less renowned individuals, with interesting implications T66. For a good account see A. Prieto Morera, ‘El proceso en el reino de León a la luz de los diplomas’, in El reino de León en la alta edad media, II: Ordenamiento jurídico del reino, León 1992, 381–518 at pp. 474–5. 63 ‘In iudicio Hopila abbas, Uermudo Allefonsiz [the count’s son], Gotini et Martinus, puerum regis, uel aliorum multorum iudicium’. For the saio ‘in presencia Hopila abbas et sagoni Allorito’; Opila’s judgement: ‘quod iudicaui manus mea feci’. 64 On the Visigothic inheritance see R. Collins, ‘Sicut lex Gothorum continet: law and charters in ninth- and tenth-century León and Catalonia’, EHR c (1985), 489–512. 62

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for social mobility. Inevitably, problems arose in the normal course of affairs, but here too the local community was able to meet these challenges. Where a centrally-run system of courts might have been expected, it fell instead to local notables to play a key role in bringing complex matters to a satisfactory end. Less formally, family and friends supplied assistance as property changed hands and shifted shape, finding itself divided or consolidated as the needs of the moment dictated. There was, then, still some sense of ‘public activity’, but this was an extension of community cohesion and collective participation, rather than the result of some imposition from above: all in all, this was a world in which choice, ambition and agency were constrained, but by no means eliminated by entrenched inequalities and difference. Whether this corresponds with the realities of life in southern Galicia during the same period forms the topic of the second half of this book.

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SOUTHERN GALICIA

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5

Galicia after Rome

Origins The history of Galicia is in many respects quite unlike that of the Liébana, and it is to the north-western corner of the Iberian Peninsula that we now turn in order to see how and why this was so. At the heart of this matter lies the supposed distinctiveness of Galician history and culture, a longstanding motif in Spanish historical and folkloric literature.1 The notion that there exists a distinctive Galician path to modernity has been advocated since at least the nineteenth century, when nationalists began to debate the putative Celtic culture of the ancient and early medieval inhabitants of the region.2 Whatever the motivations of their proponents, all arguments concerning the ethnic or cultural attributes of Galicians and their history share one feature: they attempt to set Galicia at one remove from the rest of Spain. But divorcing Galician history from wider peninsular developments is hazardous, for it risks marginalising important contextual factors. One such factor concerns the legacy of Rome, for while Ibero-Celtic and Suevic influences remain hard to detect, Roman-native cultural syncretism of the sort seen in many parts of the Roman world is abundantly evidenced in Galicia, leaving a recognisably Roman-influenced inheritance in its wake. This point was not lost on Sánchez-Albornoz, who thought it unwise to imagine Galicia ‘cloaked with the mystique of Celtic antiquity’, and chose instead to stress the weight of the Roman legacy.3 Noting that Romanitas was surprisingly resistant in this corner of the peninsula, Sánchez-Albornoz penned a series of articles that focussed on a Roman legacy that has, since he wrote, become increasingly well attested in the archaeological record.4 Romanisation The literature here is vast: an excellent guide is J. D’Emilio, ‘Paradox of Galicia: a cultural crossroads at the edge of Europe’, in his Culture and society, 3–125 at pp. 17–22. 2 J. Beramendi and X. M. Núñez Seixas, O nacionalismo galego, Vigo 1995, 18–41; J. Renales, ‘El celtismo de Benito Vicetto’, Revista de filología románica vi (1989), 325–44. 3 The phrase is from D’Emilio, ‘Paradox of Galicia’, 18. 4 On the late Roman legacy see C. Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘El tributum quadragesimale: supervivencias fiscales romanas en Galicia’, in his Estudios sobre Galicia, 269–84. See also his introductory comments to the same volume, which claim (at p. iv) that ‘in Galicia the social, juridical and governmental traditions of the Roman Empire continued for many centuries’. For a reminder that the late-Roman context needs to be afforded more importance see M. 1

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in Galicia, as elsewhere in most of Western Europe, was a matter of degree; its reality is without question. This chapter will take this reality as its starting point, and examine Galicia in the three centuries after the Roman state collapsed in the West. Subsequent chapters will take the story further, looking at village society from 800 to 1031, and the elite families whose power shaped society and politics in this region. A relic of antiquity? ‘In Galicia, at the edge of the entire world’5

The fifth-century chronicler Hydatius, bishop of Chaves, is principally known for his learned lament on the destruction of the Roman Church and empire in the north-western corner of the Iberian Peninsula, an account more or less contemporary with the events it describes. The agents of this destruction, the frenzied hordes of Hydatius’ narrative (written c. 470), were the Suevi, a Germanic group whose kingdom (c. 411–585) would later be brought to heel by the Visigoths.6 But the bishop of Chaves’s description of Galicia, or – more accurately – the late Roman province of Gallaecia, as a place ‘at the edge of the entire world’, strikes at the heart of a refrain that continues to colour the writing of the region’s history.7 Although it is easy to see how narratives of isolation and underdevelopment have formed given Galicia’s geographical position within the peninsula, these narratives do not tell the whole story, for the history of the region has been intertwined with broader developments both beyond the Leonese mountains, and to the south in what is now Portugal.8 Kulikowski, ‘The Suevi in Gallaecia’, cf. P. C. Díaz Martínez and L. R. Menéndez-Bueyes, ‘Gallaecia in late antiquity: the Suevic kingdom and the rise of local powers’ both in D’Emilio, Culture and society, 131–45, 146–74 at pp. 146–52. For an introduction to archaeological testimony of the late-Roman presence see F. Arias Vilas, A romanización de Galicia, Vigo 1992. 5 ‘intra extremam universi orbis Galleciam’: Hydatius, preface, 6, at pp. 74–5. 6 In 409 a large barbarian confederacy which included the Suevi crossed the Pyrenees and entered Hispania. The Suevi settled in the region of Gallaecia. The best overview is P. C. Díaz Martínez, El reino Suevo, Madrid 2011: ch. i for their arrival in the peninsula. For his hyperbolic remonstrations see Hydatius (38–41) at pp. 82–3. 7 Attempts have been made to challenge the view that Galicia was peripheral to the political and social development of medieval Iberia: C. Baliñas Pérez, Defensores e traditores: un modelo de relación entre poder monárquico e oligarquía nobiliar na Galicia altomedieval (718–1037), Santiago de Compostela 1988, and M. C. Pallares Méndez and E. Portela Silva, ‘Historiografía sobre la edad media de Galicia en los últimos diez años (1976–1986)’, SHHM vi (1988), 7–26. It should be noted that Sánchez-Albornoz was always interested in Galicia, but it remained for him a provincial backwater, always playing second fiddle to Castile in wider peninsular developments, as the preface to his Estudios sobre Galicia makes clear. 8 The size of the province of Gallaecia is much disputed, but it was certainly much larger than the autonomous region of Galicia, and included not only all of this latter in its modern

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One such connection between these regions is made clear by the existence of Galego (Gallego in Castilian), a language still spoken in Galicia and parts of neighbouring regions, the direct descendant of the West-Iberian Romance of Galician-Portuguese. Ironically, these clear connections to a wider peninsular world pose a problem for historians attempting to understand the early medieval history of the region before documents become plentiful in the ninth and tenth centuries, for they leave Galicia marooned in a historiographical no-man’sland. Why this is so is clear enough: the ideas of Barbero and Vigil, which have animated discussion on northern Spanish society of the early Middle Ages, have not been considered wholly relevant to debates concerning the late Roman and early medieval society of Gallaecia. And yet how could they have been? The material and written records demonstrate without question that the peoples of the north-western corner of Iberia were Romanised, albeit to differing degrees, and perhaps more thoroughly in and around cities, such as Lugo (Lucus Augusti), Astorga (Asturica Augusta) and Braga (Bracara Augusta).9 This process commenced under the Roman Republic but it was at some time in the first century ad that a distinctive and well evidenced Iron Age culture known in Galician as ‘cultura castrexa’ conclusively gave way to the might of Rome.10 Almost three centuries of relative prosperity seem to have followed before Diocletianic reform led to the creation of the province of Gallaecia in the late third century, just as the region’s mineral resources, hitherto heavily exploited, were beginning to run out.11 Provincial life carried on largely unaffected by dwindling gold reserves: excavations in the major cities suggest that they were healthy enough in the late Roman period, and they remained population centres and nodal points in ecclesiastical structures in the fourth and fifth centuries.12 The Suevi did little to alter this state of affairs, and the form, but significant swathes of surrounding territories, including what are now areas of Asturias, Castilla-León and Portugal. 9 Good summaries are to be found in F. Acuña Castroviejo, La romanización de Galicia, La Coruña 1976, and Arias Vilas, Romanización de Galicia; cf. the classic, A. Tranoy, La Galice romaine: recherches sur la nord-ouest de la péninsule Ibérique dans l‘Antiquité, Paris 1981. On cities see A. Rodríguez Colmenero, Lucus Augusti: la ciudad romano-germánica del finisterre ibérico: génesis y evolución histórica, Lugo 2011, and M. Delgado and M. Martins, ‘Bracara Augusta: uma cidade na periféra do imperio’, in Fernández Ochoa, Finisterres, 121–8. On rural settlement see F. Pérez Losada, ‘Entre a cidade e a aldea: estudio arqueohistórico dos “aglomerados secundarios” romanos en Galicia’, Brigantium xiii (2002), 15–348, and J. C. Sánchez Pardo, ‘Castros y aldeas galaicorromanos: sobre la evolución y transformación del poblamiento indígena en la Galicia Romana’, Zephyrus lv (2010), 129–48. 10 F. Calo Lourido, A cultura castrexa, Vigo 1997. 11 C. Domergue, ‘Dix-huit ans de recherche (1968–1986) sur les mines d’or romaines du Nord-Ouest de la Péninsule Ibérique’, in Actas del I congreso internacional Astorga romana, Astorga 1986, ii. 7–101. 12 Hydatius (194) at pp. 112–13, tells of the assassination of ‘Romans’ and the city rector of Lugo in 460. For the excavations see Delgado and Martins, ‘Bracara Augusta’; Rodríguez Colmenero, Lucus Augusti; and Wickham, Framing the early Middle Ages, 662–3.

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two major strongholds of their kingdom were the important Roman cities of Braga and Lugo, where their court and aristocracies were based from the mid-fifth century. The ecclesiastical structures of the kingdom in their sixth-century form are understood thanks to the remarkable document known as the Parrochiale Suevorum, which describes how a network of public churches was organised into thirteen sees on the eve of the Suevic kingdom’s annexation at the hands of the Visigoths in 585.13 Largely on the back of this document it has been argued that the kingdom was unusually precocious in church affairs, but in truth little beyond the relative dynastic stability of the royal house can be adduced from the sources, which are in any case increasingly meagre throughout the lifetime of the Suevic kingdom: records of church councils and the Chronicle of John of Biclar give us the names of kings who are in all other respects unknown.14 Nevertheless, thanks to the Parrochiale Suevorum, the numismatic record, an expanding corpus of archaeological data and later historians’ accounts of the kingdom’s demise in the sixth century, it is at least clear that the wholesale destruction of the region that Hydatius feared did not come to pass. What, then, of the politics and society of what are now Galicia and northern Portugal between the end of the period covered by Hydatius’ chronicle and the ninth century?15 Taken together, the fragmentary and patchy sources suggest that political power in the north-west may well have been correspondingly fragmentary and patchy on the ground in the immediate post-Roman centuries. The archaeology indicates that there were relatively few large late antique villae in the Iberian north-west, suggesting that some elite groups may have been based in cities in the post-Roman centuries, as Hydatius implies.16 Yet elites may not have been entirely confined to the urban environment, especially after the Suevic kingdom was reduced by the Visigoths in the late sixth century, which likely saw Braga and Lugo lose prominence to cities closer to the Visigothic heartlands of the Meseta. Looking beyond cities, so-called catastrophist visions of the end of direct Roman rule in north-western Iberia are misleading: a wide variety of types of settlement has emerged in the archaeological record, spanning the fifth 13 P. C. Díaz Martínez, ‘El Parrochiale Suevum [sic]: organización eclesiástica, poder político y poblamiento en la Gallaecia tardoantigua’, in J. Alvar (ed.), Homenaje a José Mª Blázquez, Madrid 1997, 35–47. For a useful recent reproduction of the text see J. M. Novo Güisán, ‘Lugo en los tiempos oscuros: las menciones literarias de la ciudad entre los siglos v y x (iii)’, Boletín do museo provincial de Lugo viii (1997–8), 177–93. 14 For a sober recent assessment see Kulikowski, ‘The Suevi’. 15 For numismatic evidence see J. M. Peixoto Cabral and D. M. Metcalf, A moeda sueva, Porto 1997. On the Suevic Church see P. Ubric, ‘The Church in the Suevic kingdom (411–585 ad)’, in D’Emilio, Culture and society, 210–43; cf. E. A. Thompson, ‘The conversion of the Spanish Suevi to Catholicism’, in E. James (ed.), Visigothic Spain: new approaches, Oxford 1980, 77–92. 16 On villae see J. López Quiroga, Arqueología del hábitat rural en la península iberica, siglos V–X, Madrid 2009, 40–7; cf. Chavarría Arnau, El final de las villae, 285–90.

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to the eighth centuries, with both new constructions and the re-use of existing ones clearly evidenced in diverse contexts. These range from fish-salting factories to necropolises, and from terraced hillsides to small farmsteads.17 Settled farming communities in nucleated and poly-nucleated sites dotted the fields and terraces of post-Roman Galicia.18 There was, in short, no large-scale abandonment of the countryside, yet it is less clear how the communities that took shape in the post-Roman period were organised. Martín Viso and Castellanos García have posited the idea that new poles of political authority emerged in response to the absence of a single dominant power of the sort that Rome long represented.19 These took diverse forms, building upon both the civitates of the north-west, whose senior churchmen attended councils in Braga and Toledo, and, simultaneously, the continued use of castra and oppida, fortified settlements in rural areas which may have acted as ‘central places’.20 Pinpointing individuals involved in these processes is difficult. Bishops were clearly important figures, controlling their sees and tending their flocks, the most famous being Martin of Braga, known to Gregory of Tours as a man of unusual brilliance.21 Martin seems to have been instrumental in establishing closer ties between the Catholic Church and the Suevic monarchy, but there are indications too that Suevic control in the sixth century may not have gone unchallenged.22 Regional strongmen, such as the senior Aspidius in the Orense region, represented alternative beacons of power; indeed, if John of Biclar is to be believed, Aspidius was a figure of such stature that King Leovigild felt compelled to send a Visigothic army against him in the 580s.23 Remnants of this army are likely to have remained in Galicia throughout the seventh century, as

17 C. Sánchez Pardo, ‘Poblamiento rural tardorromano y altomedieval en Galicia (ss. v–x): una revisión arqueológica’, AM xxxvii (2010), 285–306; cf. J. López Quiroga, El final de la antigüedad en la ‘Gallaecia’: la transformación de las estructuras de poblamiento entre Miño y Duero (siglos V al X), La Coruña 2004. On rural archaeology see López Quiroga Arqueología del hábitat rural, which incorporates Galician material. 18 Sánchez Pardo, ‘Poblamiento rural’, 292–3. 19 I. Martín Viso and S. Castellanos García, ‘The local articulation of central power in the north of the Iberian Peninsula (500–1000)’, EME xiii (2005), 1–41. 20 Hydatius (81), at pp. 90–1, suggests that castra formed part of the network of defensive sites occupied by Hispano-Romans in the fifth century: ‘plebem quae castella tutiora retinebat’. 21 On Martin of Braga see A. Ferreiro, ‘The missionary labors of St Martin of Braga in sixth-century Galicia’, Studia Monastica xxiii (1981), 11–26. For Gregory’s description of Martin see his Decem libri historiarum, MGH, SRM i/1, v, at p. 243. Closer to home, Isidore also knew of the fame of Martin, including him in his biographical sketches of illustrious men, accessed in El ‘De viris illustribus’ de Isidoro de Sevilla: estudio y edición crítica, ed. C. Codoñer Merino, Salamanca 1964, xxii, at pp. 145–6. 22 Ubric gives a judiciously cautious account of the chronology of the Suevic conversion to Catholicism: ‘The Church’, 220–2. 23 IBC, a. 575, p. 214.

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the Visigothic court looked to absorb the region, and – presumably – its leading powerbrokers, into the structures of the kingdom. Occasionally there are glimpses of this process. The anonymous Life of Fructuosus, for example, describes the extensive programme of monastic foundation carried out by this ascetic, reformer and metropolitan bishop of Braga in the mid-seventh century, noting of the aristocratic Fructuosus that he was ‘the son of the supreme head and duke of the army of Spain’ (‘sublimissimi culminis atque ducis exercitus Spaniae prolis’); a certain Dogila, dux of Lugo, is also mentioned by the same source.24 If this is combined with what can be said about Ricimer, a seventhcentury aristocrat from the Bierzo who patronised the construction of churches in an area marginal to the Visigothic court, then it is clear that rich individuals, marked out by their social cachet, prospered in Gallaecia from about 450 to 700.25 These individuals lived in a wider region the commercial complexity of which is only now emerging: Vigo has recently been subject to a detailed analysis which suggests that the port remained an active centre of trade with far flung Mediterranean and North Atlantic locales well into the seventh century, and the coordination of this commerce likely involved elites whose lives now escape us.26 These pockets of wealth are only dimly discernible, but both archaeological and textual indications bring to light some basic features of this society: from 500 to 700 new and diverse forms of rural habitation emerged alongside older settlement types, such as the castra cited by Hydatius. Yet where once the castro and the civitas dominated, by 700 or so the church, the monastery and the small farmstead characterised this landscape. Local society was likely organised, such as it was, by abbots, bishops and their cliques, and secular elites such as Ricimer were clearly significant figures too. What religious and secular elites had in common was that the environment in which they operated grew increasingly rural. Indeed an elite diaspora must have followed in the wake of rural church building and monastic foundation in the countryside, as urban politics became less important. Certain Galician cities did retain some vestigial prestige: Lugo, Braga and Tuy were among those which sent bishops to church councils in Toledo in the seventh century, but by the Third Council of Braga in 675, Lugo seems to have lost its metropolitan status, a sure sign that its

24 VSF [2] at p. 82, for Fructuosus’ origins; and [7] at pp. 88–90, for his endeavours in Galicia. Dogila is mentioned in the O manuscript, and is discussed by Díaz y Díaz in Vita S. Fructuosi, ed. M. C. Díaz y Díaz, in La vida de San Fructuoso de Braga: studio y edición crítica, Braga 1974, at p. 89 n. 5. 25 Valerio, Ordo Querimoniae, v, 80–5, in Valerio of Bierzo (Aherne edn). For a sound translation see Valerio del Bierzo: su persona: su obra, ed. M. C. Díaz y Díaz, León 2006, 256–60. 26 On Vigo see A. Fernández, El comercio tardoantiguo (ss. iv–vii) en el noroeste peninsular a través del registro cerámico de la ría de Vigo, Oxford 2014; cf. J. C. Sánchez Pardo, ‘Sobre las bases económicas de las aristocracias en la Gallaecia Suevo-Visigoda (ca. 530–650 dc): comercio, minería y articulación fiscal’, AEM xliv (2014), 983–1023.

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prominence dwindled under Visigothic rule.27 In sum, Galicia in the seventh century (although sparsely served by evidence) is best understood as a distant satellite protectorate of the Visigothic realm – a region in which the general trend was towards the dissipation of political power, and its shifting locus. Slowly a more rural, more militarised world, held together by monasteries rather than cities, emerged in ‘Dark Age’ Galicia. The question therefore arises as to how the society and politics of the Iberian north-west was affected by the Arab-Berber invasion of 711 and its aftermath. Galicia after 711 Thirty or so years after the Arab conquest of Iberia, which saw Galicia suffer the raiding, extortion and deal-making which took place in many parts of the peninsula, a revolt broke out in Tangier amongst the Berbers of North Africa. Although the epicentre of this unrest was located far from the wetter climes of Galicia, this event – the Great Berber Revolt – was to have profound implications further afield, reaching al-Andalus in late 740.28 According to the Akhbār Majmū‘a, an anonymous tenth- or eleventh-century compilation of earlier material, the Berber detachments stationed in the north-west of Spain quickly joined the rebellion and killed or expelled all the Arabs in Galicia.29 The revolt was quashed by the Arab authorities, but not before the nature and extent of their political control in the peninsula was fundamentally changed: Galicia, hitherto a marginal fixture of the Andalusi polity, would after the 740s operate as a client marcher territory of the expanding Asturian kingdom closer to home.30 Thus, any Islamic influence ushered in by the conquest had been more or less curtailed by the middle of the eighth century. Remote and far removed from al-Andalus proper, in such circumstances the aristocracy of Galicia would not have grown accustomed to the new political structures and cultural patterns imposed from Córdoba that soon obtained further south and east.31 Galicia, therefore, was practically the only large area of relative lowland, dotted with good quality arable, that the Arabs failed to conquer permanently, which helps to explain the survival in this region of a

27 Concilios visigóticos e hispanorromanos, Braga III. The best account of these matters is Isla Frez, Sociedad gallega, ch. i. 28 Salvatierra and Canto, De la invasión, 36–40. 29 For an account of which see the Akhbār Majmū‘a, here consulted in translation in Ajbar Machmua, ed. and trans. E. Lafuente y Alcántara, Madrid 1867, 48. 30 A. Mª. Carballeira Debasa, Galicia y los gallegos en las fuentes árabes medievales, Madrid 2007. 31 Collins, Arab conquest, 153–4; E. Portela Silva and M. C. Pallares Méndez, ‘Idade media: a continuidade e a transmisión (séculos viii ó x)’, in Nova historia de Galicia, La Coruña 1996, 165–85.

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rich, indigenous, aristocratic stratum – visible in the charters from the ninth century.32 Intriguingly, nevertheless, and for reasons that must remain opaque, a separate political consciousness did not crystallise around a family of local kings, as it did in the Asturias. Putting why this was so to one side, the salient fact remains that the social and political impact of the Muslims on Galicia was transitory and insubstantial, and that public power, Christian or Islamic, was negligible there in the eighth century. This being the case, local Galician elites may well have become stronger after about 740 because they were situated beyond the reach of the tax-collectors of the Emirate. This circumstance would also provide a context for the actions of the ambitious Asturian kings who turned their eyes to the west after the Berber Revolt. None of them was more ambitious than Alfonso i (739–57) and Fruela i (757–68), who between them brought under Asturian hegemony much of Galicia as well as many other settlements in Iberia, according to the later Chronicle of Alfonso III.33 Quite how this hegemony was achieved is not made clear in the sources, but the heroic refoundation of western settlements suggested by the chronicles likely masks conflict with elite Galician groups to whom the benefits of quid pro quo arrangements were perhaps not immediately obvious. This much can surely be read into the revolts that arose in Galicia throughout the eighth century, later finding their way into the histories of the Asturian court.34 But whether peaceful or not, westward expansion of the Asturian kingdom did not mean the repopulation of a deserted wasteland, but merely an attempt to draw the western reaches of the peninsula within Oviedo’s sphere of influence, a process partially visible in the sources. Crucial here is the Chronicle of Alfonso III, written a considerable time after the events that it purports to record, and clearly the mouthpiece of the late ninth-century royal court. Fewer quibbles can be prompted by an original document dated to 775, however, which demonstrates that Galicia lay within the theatre of political operations directed by Asturian kings. This document, a charter issued by King Silo (774–83), records how the Asturian monarch made a donation of land situated between the Eo and Masma rivers in Galicia to a group of fratres et

Portass, ‘All quiet on the western front?’ passim; Isla Frez, Alta edad media, 171: ‘todo apunta a que estos grupos aristocráticos norteños estaban enraizados en realidades anteriores, es decir, a que con algunas salvedades, la aristocracia de este período proviene de la de la época visigoda’ (‘everything points to the fact that these northern aristocratic groups were rooted in earlier realities, that is, that with few exceptions, the aristocracy of this period originates from that of the Visigothic period’); cf. C. Baliñas Pérez, Gallegos del año mil, La Coruña 1988, 88. 33 This began in the mid-eighth century under Alfonso i, absorbing ‘pars maritimam Gallecie’ for which see Rot., 14, and Seb., 14. This venture reached the Miño under Fruela i, according to the Rotensis: Rot., 16. 34 Isla Frez, ‘The aristocracy and the monarchy’, 251–80 at p. 253. The slaves’ revolt of 770 is a case in point: Rot., 16. 32

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servos Dei.35 It represents the earliest extant example of a royal diploma from the Asturian kingdom, and given that the donation deals exclusively in land located in the eastern extremities of Galicia, links between the aristocracies of both regions can be affirmed by this date.36 A very different approach was none the less adopted by Silo in about 780, when he crushed a rebel uprising in Galicia; evidently, sometimes the expanding Asturian kingdom had occasion to adopt a more ruthless position vis-à-vis the Galician magnates whose loyalty it was trying to win.37 Some fifty years later, political relations between the kings of Asturias and at least some high-ranking Galicians seem to have remained intact. A document from 818 informs us that Alfonso ii (791–842) dispatched an individual named Count Aloito to settle a dispute in Montaos, near the river Tambre, in the present-day province of La Coruña. The embroilment, between two families, concerned properties in the territory of the village identified in the document as ‘uilla Ostulata’.38 In his capacity as judge (‘et per ordinationem domni Adefonsi principis concessi ego iam nominatus Aloitus’), Count Aloito successfully resolved the situation and received some of the disputed assets by way of payment. This is the first documentary description of direct comital involvement in Galicia – several decades before named counts emerge in the Liébana charters. Further compelling indications of the importance of Galician magnates can be found in later ninth-century documents. The accession of Ramiro i (842–50) marks an event that clearly demonstrates the might of political operators from the western end of the kingdom. With little fanfare, the Chronicle of Alfonso III asserts that Ramiro i was the legitimate successor to Alfonso ii, but that the new king had been wickedly deprived of his rightful place on the throne by Nepotianus.39 The latter, or so the Chronicle has it, seized power in the royal capital of Oviedo after Alfonso ii’s death in 842. But the circumstances surrounding these events arouse strong suspicions. The Rotensis version of the chronicle reports that: In the era 881 (843), after the death of Alfonso, Ramiro, son of the Prince Vermudo, was elected king. At that time he was away from the throne because he had travelled to the province of Vardulias to take a wife. When King Alfonso departed from this world, Nepotianus, count of the palace, rebelled and seized power. When he first heard what had happened, King Ramiro made for the Flo9. A. García Leal offers an in-depth study of the charter: El diploma del rey Silo, La Coruña 2008. 37 Rot., 17 and Seb., 17. This is also discussed in Baliñas Pérez, Defensores e traditores, 23–8. 38 It is very interesting, when thinking about continuity of settlement, to note that this document describes the location of the disputed area in relation to a pre-Roman or Roman period castro settlement (‘subtus castro Brione’). The document is Sob43, also Flo28 (818). 39 Rot., 23; Seb., 23. 35 36

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region of Galicia and assembled his army in the city of Lugo. After a short period of time, he invaded Asturias. When Nepotianus learned of his arrival, he went with his army to meet him at the bridge over the river Narcea. But when the battle began, Nepotianus was deserted by all of his men and was quickly put to flight. He was captured in the province of Primorias by the two counts Scipio and Sonna and his eyes were put out.40

Acceptance of this narrative, however, overlooks several important considerations. First, Nepotianus, the count of the palace (‘palati comes’), must in all probability have been in Oviedo at the time of Alfonso’s death or shortly after, fulfilling the duties which went with his office as count of the royal palace. As he was perhaps the most senior figure at court, his job in 842 would have been to ensure the continued pre-eminence of the Asturian faction which had ruled since the eighth century. According to the Rotensis, on hearing the news of Nepotianus’ move for the kingship, Ramiro made for the region of Galicia, and assembled his army in the city of Lugo; thus, Ramiro clearly had a support base in this region, including an armed retinue of sufficient size to enable him to march on Oviedo.41 Indeed, similarly crucial as an indicator of Ramiro’s role at this time is the chronicler’s telling admission that after a short period, Ramiro invaded Asturias.42 An invasion of Asturias by an army mobilised in Lugo looks suspiciously like a classic coup d’état, as Estepa Díez has underlined.43 All things considered it seems that a Galician magnate faction helped Ramiro i wrest the throne from the Asturian group assembled around the royal palace, a narrative which would have to be legitimised in the Chronicle by presenting this civil strife as nothing more than the re-imposition of order. This reading would help to explain the clear concern of Ramiro i’s son (Ordoño i, 850–66) and grandson (Alfonso iii, 866–910) to enter into political relationships with the grandest aristocratic families of Galicia, a move which is demonstrated on many occasions in the charters.44 In essence, this was a matter of political expediency. The dynasty of Ramiro i needed to cultivate this support network in Galicia because the region’s rich magnate class had helped it to win the throne and would help to ensure that Galicia remained within the fold whilst kings themselves ruled from Oviedo. Foundations were duly put in place, and the kings of Asturias were by the time of Alfonso iii intricately linked to elite Galician families. This modus operandi made sense for both parties. Asturian kings from Alfonso ii onwards Translated by Wolf, Conquerors and chroniclers, 174. ‘Gallecie in partibus se contulit et in ciuitatem Lucensem exercitum quoadunauit’. 42 ‘Post paucum vero temporis spatium in Astores inruptionem fecit’. 43 Estepa Díez, ‘El poder regio’, 455. 44 In the middle of the ninth century, under Ordoño i, the chronicles recount the absorption into the kingdom of the Tuy region: Rot., 25; Seb., 25; Alb., xv. 11. Orense was seemingly integrated by the Asturian kingdom under Alfonso iii: Alb., xv. 12. 40 41

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were strikingly ambitious, but it is unlikely that the mountainous lands of the Asturias provided the economic resources to match that ambition; by the same token, for Galician magnates these alliances offered the opportunity to obtain political power on a scale previously beyond their reach. These factors help to explain why the political gravity of the Asturian kingdom seems to have been pulled westwards in the late ninth century. Political negotiation, backed up by the force of arms, was the foundation upon which these very rich Galician elites and their would-be Asturian masters built some sort of agreement; the nature of this relationship becomes clearer after 900 thanks to more abundant surviving documentation.45 The increasing interaction between regional magnate factions and the ruling dynasty in the Asturias may provide a context for the ninth-century discovery of the tomb of the apostle St James at Compostela.46 Many early documents which point to the existence of a cult of St James before 850 have been shown to be, at best, vitiated by interpolations.47 Yet there can be little doubt that this tradition took root throughout the century that followed, and López Alsina has convincingly demonstrated that the city of Santiago de Compostela began to grow in size and importance in the second half of the ninth century.48 From about 900 and possibly earlier, western Galicia became a centre of spiritual devotion as Compostela became a fundamental part of the ideological basis of the Astur-Leonese monarchy, further enmeshing the lay and ecclesiastical aristocracies of both regions. Consequently, Galicia and its magnates came to play an indispensable role in the politics of the entire kingdom, and central to this process was a handful of leading families. One of these, the family of Rosendo, associated with Celanova and analysed in what follows, played a pivotal role in this process, its monastery, San Salvador de Celanova, at once a beacon of royal power, an estate management centre and a spiritual home. The political dynamics at the heart of this process were quite unlike anything in the Liébana in the same period, where aristocrats capable of operating on a kingdom-wide level are simply not visible in the charters before the late tenth century and were in large measure ‘new men’. In contrast, such was the stature of Galician powerbrokers in our period that they were central to the construction of the Asturian kingdom.

Illustrative of this relationship is the documentation collected in the Tumbo A de Santiago de Compostela (documents hereafter cited as SdeC1, SdeC2 etc.), a twelfth-century compilation of royal privileges (although some of these texts have been interpolated). 46 López Alsina, La ciudad de Santiago, 113–26; E. Elorduy, ‘La tradición jacobea de Galicia en el siglo ix’, Hispania xxii (1962), 323–56. 47 Collins, Caliphs and kings, 114–16. 48 López Alsina, La ciudad de Santiago, 151–202. 45

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The evidence in context: monasteries and magnates The monastery of Celanova was founded in 936 in what is now a small town of some 5,500 or so inhabitants in southern Galicia.49 To this day the monastery dominates the centre of Celanova, sitting proudly amidst the hustle and bustle of the town’s main square. The wider historical significance of Celanova helps to explain why it remains a focal point of the local community, but its grandeur has also long been apparent to scholars; a particularly learned visitor to express admiration for the monastery and its history was the sixteenth-century humanist and historian Ambrosio de Morales.50 ‘O vello mosteiro’ also served as a source of inspiration for the poet and intellectual Manuel Curros Enríquez in more recent times.51 In short, the monastery of Celanova has not wanted for fame, yet its twelfth-century cartulary has received fragmentary and insufficient critical attention from historians.52 Like most monasteries of great age, Celanova has experienced periods of both splendour and relative poverty. But if fluctuating fortunes over a period of more than ten centuries are to be expected, the construction of an archive in which to store the documents that tell of such fortunes and misfortunes is equally likely. The shoring-up of institutional memory achieved by the steady accretion of documents certainly seems to have been afforded due consideration by successive generations of monks at Celanova – hardly surprising, perhaps, considering their vested interest in retaining records of the monastery’s holdings. The monks were powerless, however, when the unstable political course of nineteenth-century Spain reached a critical point during the process of desamortización in the 1830s; Celanova, like Santo Toribio, felt the full force of these changes. In 1840 the documentation from the monastic archive at Celanova was transferred to Orense, the capital city of the southern Galician province which bears the same name. A decade later, many of the archive’s most prized documents were sent to Madrid, where they have remained ever since.53 The Instituto Nacional de Estadística gave the total population of Celanova as 5, 615 in 2014. This figure was accurate as of June 2015. For more information see . 50 For Ambrosio de Morales’s comment see his Viage de Ambrosio de Morales por orden del rey D. Phelipe II a los reynos de León, y Galicia, y principado de Asturias, 20th edn, Madrid 1985, 151–3. 51 These words are taken from the late nineteenth-century poem ‘A igrexa fría’. I have made use of a modern edition, M. Curros Enríquez, Aires da miña terra: e outros poemas, Vigo 1995. 52 A useful if brief account is provided in O. Gallego, El archivo del monasterio de Celanova, Madrid 1991; cf. C. Sáez and A. E. Gutiérrez García-Muñoz, ‘Hacia una interpretación del Tumbo de Celanova’, in Iglesia y religiosidad en España: historia y archivos, Guadalajara 2002, 997–1008. 53 These documents are to be found at the Archivo Histórico Nacional, in Madrid (Sección de Códices: Tumbo de Celanova, N° 986B). Some of the documents taken from 49

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Studied as a coherent corpus, these charters allow us to examine the proprietorial business of the magnate family that dominated southern Galician political life from at least the ninth century to the early eleventh. In close association with Celanova, the family acquired dozens of estates in and beyond southern Galicia after 936. As always, aristocratic manoeuvring had an effect on other elements of society, and the dynamics of social relations both within village society, and between those who toiled on the land and their landlords, are also examined here. Framing this village world was a public carapace of courts and taxation. What light can be shed on the true nature of its dimensions and efficacy? And did the public sphere in southern Galicia, as it did in the Liébana, have multiple manifestations, operated variously by public agents, local powerbrokers and powerful men of the Church? In examining these questions, focus will almost exclusively fall on the documents from the monastery of Celanova, since they offer the most informative picture of society and politics in the region of Celanova itself. These documents do not survive on single sheets but instead take the form of later copies, collected together in a codex considered to be among the peninsula’s most valuable. Known as the Tumbo de Celanova, this compendium is itself the result of the seventeenthcentury binding of three separate cartularies, all of which date to some point in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries.54 Sáez and Sáez have recorded 301 Celanova documents dating to before 1007, when their edition comes to an end; for the period spanning from 1007 to 1031 Andrade’s edition tells us that the monastery furnishes approximately eighty-five charters.55 Alongside these plentiful documents from Celanova there are also important collections from elsewhere in the Iberian north-west, consulted here but not analysed or incorporated systematically due to this study’s focus on the Celanova region.56 Of Celanova in 1840 remain in Galicia and are currently held in the Archivo de la Catedral de Orense, and others in the Archivo Histórico Provincial de Orense. Nevertheless, the editors of CDC stress that they have attempted to include every document from the archive at Celanova and not merely those documents which form part of the Tumbo. 54 The best guide is Gallego, El archivo. 55 Thus the CDC is the edition used here for all documents from before 31 December 1006; all of these documents are cited Cel1, Cel2, etc. For documents written after this date, I have used Tombo, citing these documents as TdeC1, TdeC2, etc., and using the numbering system preferred by the editor. The numbers of documents given here can only be approximate because there is some disagreement as to whether some texts are components of the same document, or should be treated as separate charters. 56 Major collections consulted here include the two twelfth-century cartularies of Sobrado, here Sob1, Sob2, etc., which provide just over 100 documents from before 1031, including nineteen which date to before 900. Documents collated under the title of La Coruña, here cited as LC1, LC2, etc., bring together the collections of three monasteries from that province. Totalling 136 charters (from 788 to 1031) and now spread between public and religious archives, the best characterisation of these documents can be found in Barrett, ‘The written and the world’, 290. It is very difficult to know accurate numbers of northern Portuguese documents for the period to 1031 because systematic work on them has not been undertaken. Several hundred records exist for the period before 1031. For more information

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these other collections, that of Sobrado renders especially useful information, and there is occasional ‘overlap’ between the localities and the persons that appear in charters collected in different cartularies.57 In contrast with the Liébana, then, the surviving documentation from the west of the peninsula is relatively abundant, and local society and the political order can consequently be examined in detail in southern Galicia, particularly after 900. Looking at the material, this society’s reliance on the written word comes fully into view; the deals, transactions and relationships captured in charters show that textuality permeated early medieval society in Galicia to an extent not often acknowledged.58 But however immersed these communities were in a world where the written word was accessible either directly or via proxies, what makes Celanova such an interesting case study are the special and clearly documented circumstances of its origins, for it was founded after land originally given in royal gift changed hands within the same rich landowning family for the express purpose of founding a monastery.59 This family was one of the most powerful in northern Spain and this fact has significant ramifications for any conception of the development of social relations and the dynamics of power in this region: quite simply, the family of Rosendo operated on a scale that left the Liébana’s major landowning families standing in the shade, a fact that helps to explain the identifiable differences between these local societies.60 Celanova was founded by the most important set of lay landowners in Galicia, which meant that there was no initial period during which the monastery struggled amongst competing local institutions to assert its position of social dominance in southern Galicia – quite the opposite seems to have been the case, for the documents suggest that Celanova was the most important monastic institution in the region within a decade of its foundation. This had a great deal to do with the social and political status of its founding family, many of whose members held comital titles and figured among the king’s most trusted magnates. These framing observations already demonstrate significant differences between the major families at the heart of the regional case studies which are see A. Evangelista Márques, ‘Para um inventário da documentaçao diplomática anterior a 1101 conservada em arquivos portugueses’, in Mundos medievales: espacios, sociedades y poder: homenaje al profesor José Ángel García de Cortázar Ruiz de Aguirre, Santander 2012, 705–18. The bulk of the Portuguese material that I have consulted is recorded in PMH, documents cited as PMH1, PMH2, etc. Likewise, the entire known corpus of documents from Lugo has not been collected and published, but the following has proved useful: J. L. López Sangil and M. Vidán Torreira, ‘Tumbo Viejo de Lugo’, Est. Mind. xxvii (2011), 11–373. 57 However, these have not been used systematically here because fewer of them record transactions that pertain directly to the Celanova region. 58 Barrett, ‘The written and the world’, passim. 59 Three charters are of particular importance when tracing the origins of the monastery of Celanova: Cel26 (927), Cel44 (935) and Cel53 (936). 60 This family saw its power cemented by the marriage of Gutier Menéndez with Ilduara Eriz in the early tenth century: see chapter 8 below.

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the focus of this book; wealth and political power were on a different scale. Furthermore, the family of Rosendo owned property across a far larger area than the richest families of the Liébana, and its holdings were spread across a range of topographies whose geographical attributes varied greatly from one to another, resisting overall characterisation. Thus, the family’s landed interest cannot be so easily defined in spatial terms, and its growth is much harder to track than that of Bagaudano and Faquilona, which was mostly confined to one valley of the Liébana. For example, one area in which a certain concentration of Celanova’s property acquisition seems to have occurred roughly approximates to the modern comarca of A Limia in the province of Orense. The comarca takes its name from the eponymous river which carves its way through a series of valleys, interwoven by a patchwork of arable concentrated in the lower reaches.61 Although the region of the lower Limia is in places quite mountainous, these hills do not encircle and thus delineate a subregion of territory in the way that the uplands surrounding the Liébana do. They are, in fact, much more easily traversable, and the fractured relief which characterises much of southern and central Galicia results in valley floors whose quaternary sediments allow for the cultivation of a wide range of crops. In southern Galicia and along the western coast extending into Portugal, large-scale viticulture is also possible, a fact reflected in numerous documents depicting the purchase or sale of vineyards. The other principal base of Celanova’s landed interest was the comarca of Terra de Celanova itself, which extends over approximately 508 kms², an area only a little smaller than the entire Liébana. Its most striking attribute is its many rivers, including tributaries of the Sil and the Miño, which irrigate this land well enough for it to support extensive cultivation; this is in spite of the dry ‘Mediterranean’ summers, the heat and relative lack of rainfall that differentiates the comarca from much of Galicia, especially the wet north-western corner and coastline, where the monastery of Celanova also owned land.62 But it is the southern Galician heartlands – now Terra de Celanova, A Limia and, slightly to the northeast, Allariz – which form the mise-en-scène of this study. And this world of low valleys, verdant hills and winding rivers played a role in the monastery’s corporate expansion: for the custodians of Celanova, the limits of their world were the limits of their ambition, because landscape offered no impediment to the growth of their monastery’s landed interests in the way that it did in the Liébana. The possibilities offered by the landscape were therefore a factor in shaping the political and economic power of the major families in 61 ‘The river valleys of the Limia and the Tamega, draining in a south-westerly direction from the highlands of southern Galicia, form natural routes respectively from Orense through Celanova to Braga and from Verín through Chaves towards Viseu and Coimbra’: Fletcher, St James’s catapult, 2–3. 62 Cel36 (932) witnesses Segesinda make a donation to Rosendo of land in Ortigueira, on the northern Atlantic coast of Galicia, approximately some 200 kms to the north of Celanova.

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each region. Whether the local society of both regions can be said to have been broadly comparable in the ninth and early tenth centuries, before Celanova’s foundation, is the subject of the next chapter.

Map 5.  Celanova.

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6

Before Celanova Only seven ninth-century charters survive in the Tumbo de Celanova.1 The earliest dates to 842, some fifty-two years after surviving charters begin in the Santo Toribio cartulary, and ninety-four years before the monastery of Celanova was founded in 936.2 The insights that these seven charters provide can be augmented by information drawn from ninth-century documents belonging to other Galician cartularies such as Sobrado, but if we are prepared to look beyond 900 in search of a more compelling turning point, the Celanova material offers new vistas.3 A crucial moment in the region’s early medieval history was the foundation of Celanova, and it therefore makes sense to use the date of this event, 12 September 936, as a partition of convenience. Fifty-two charters from the Tumbo pre-date the monastery’s foundation and many of these describe transactions undertaken by non-elite actors, allowing us to appreciate various aspects of local society in southern Galicia. In the chapters that follow, we return to the village world once again, this time looking at developments after Celanova’s foundation, before elite politics and the workings of the public sphere will take precedence: this will allow us to see how and in what ways the presence of Celanova and the status of its leading family shaped the development of local society. The social landscape To the extent that ninth- and early tenth-century communities were bound by Christian rites and routines, the social landscape of southern Galicia – all those families, friends and neighbours visible – was also a deeply religious one. Sánchez Pardo has described a ninth-century world populated by a multitude of small local churches, each providing for the needs of the community, forming a fixed devotional locus for villagers concerned for the souls of the

The seven ninth-century charters are Cel1 (842); Cel2 (856); Cel3 (871); Cel4 (871); Cel5 (879); Cel6 (886); and Cel7 (889). 2 The foundation document is Cel53. 3 Eighteen ninth-century charters survive from Sobrado: Sob82 (803); Sob77 (817); Sob43 (818); Sob83 (827); Sob18 (838); Sob34 (842); Sob72 (858); Sob75 (858); Sob76 (860); Sob124 (860); Sob58 (865); Sob123 (867); Sob68 (877); Sob84 (878); Sob73 (883); Sob80 (887); Sob119 (887); and Sob81 (895). Another thirty-two Sobrado documents date to between 900 and 936, the year of Celanova’s foundation. 1

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departed.4 Admittedly, a mere handful of ninth-century documents survive in the Celanova collection, but a consolidated culture of worship is presupposed by the many religious books which the priest Beatus gave to a church at Arnoya in 889.5 These included psalters, antiphonaries and hymn-books, as well as a copy of the Forum Iudicum and Uitas Patrum. These venerable tomes were given to a church that Beatus had recently restored, so this was not a new foundation but a replenishment of the staples needed for settled religious practice: hence the appearance of books, candles and crosses in the charter’s list of provisions. Even so, if any single religious institution dominated southern Galicia in the ninth century – as Celanova would come to do in the tenth – then its records have been lost to posterity. This stands in marked contrast with further east: in the Liébana, San Salvador de Villeña’s charters later came to form part of San Martín’s/Santo Toribio’s archive, but no such pattern of assimilation can be ascertained in the Celanova material. Instead, there is a ragbag of documents of different type and provenance, all presumably kept and later copied into the Tumbo because of a link, most probably proprietorial, established at some later date between Celanova and the lands or persons recorded in the early charters. Two monastic pacts, one of which seems to have been redacted together with another document which provides the nascent monastic community with a significant endowment (also preserved in the Tumbo), sit alongside a peasant sale, a donation to Alfonso iii by local lords, a rambling account of the church foundations of a once well-known abbot, and a more orthodox donation.6 When the insights offered by these seven charters are considered within the broader context of the early tenth-century documentation, this small world begins to take shape. One of the first things to emerge with clarity is the role of the nuclear family, which was nothing less than the glue that held together the bonds of local society. And it is the concern to safeguard, add to, or profitably dispose of family property – to buy, sell, donate or exchange it – that brings the centrality of the family fully into focus. By way of example, consider the exchange made by Petrus and his wife Villonem in 931, which saw them relinquish their claim to land formerly in the possession of Petrus’ grandfather – land which must have been in the family’s possession since the ninth century.7 Family decisions J. C. Sánchez Pardo, ‘Sobre los orígenes y evolución de las primeras iglesias rurales en la alta edad media: el caso de Terra de Celanova (Ourense)’, Revista Aquae Flaviae xli (2009), 433–48. 5 Cel7 (889). The long-standing influence of Christianity in Galicia is also made clear by the reference to the Rule and the authority of the Fathers (‘secundum textum regule et sua patrum auctoritas sanxit’) in Cel1 (842), which derived from well-established monastic traditions. This is discussed in Bishko, ‘Pactual tradition’, passim. 6 For the rambling account of Abbot Astrulfo see Cel1 (842); for the pacts see Cel2 (856) and Cel4 (871); for the donation that prefigures the pactual agreement recorded in Cel4 see Cel3 (871); for the peasant sale see Cel5 (879); for the royal donation see Cel6 (886); for the remaining donation see Cel7 (889). 7 ‘que habemus de auio nostro Odoario’: Cel34. 4

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were sometimes taken at the connubial level too: husband and wife can be seen operating together in a sale of 923, one example which can stand for dozens more in the Tumbo.8 But the proprietorial instinct required textual sanction if family inheritance was to survive the test of time, a fact to which elite families and individuals, as well as their peasant counterparts, were equally alive.9 And thus moved by a desire to protect their interests, both small-scale dealers and regional elites had the good sense to acquire title deeds. More often than not, items of business required the production of specific types of document to record them, and in some cases this is made clear in the body of the charter; thus, for example, the scribe commissioned by Petrus and his wife categorised the charter that he was writing as a ‘document of exchange’. Alongside these latter in the Tumbo are documents described as charters of sale (venditionis) or donation (donationis). To qualify the charter by its type and specific function must say something about the normality of charter production and use in this society.10 Why else makes it plain that it was specifically a textum contramutationis that rubber-stamped Petrus’ deal, if the creation and possession of a document of this type served no particular function? Such distinctions developed and charters bearing them were deployed precisely because documents responsive to a variety of needs were required in order to manage family business affairs. The classification of charter-type by the creators of a given document also suggests an acquaintance with an array of template-documents from which to choose, which must in turn indicate the embeddedness of a charter-writing culture in this society. Distinct types of document (charters of sale, donation and exchange) none the less shared certain features in language and layout, and it is the formulaic aspect of charters which speaks most persuasively of their utility. Classifiable by type yet recognisable by means of an array of shared stock phrases and clauses, the charter spread throughout society in response to this latter’s needs; indeed the availability of mechanisms enabling the transfer and retention of land was clearly central to family concerns. As ever, to explain patterns or apparent oddities in the surviving number of documents is an exacting process, but there must have been something of a ‘snowball’ effect at work here: when densely proprietorial societies awoke to the usefulness of title deeds, the proliferation of documents that followed likely made their production and retention increasingly indispensable. Writing charters was part of the process of legitimising claims to ownership, but it was only one part, for such documents had to reflect social arrangements in ways considered beneficial to their commissioners or writers. And in the small-scale rural societies of medieval Europe, securing the good will of one’s family, friends and neighbours was crucial.11 Lending the documents ‘Ego Trasuario et uxor mea Sauildi’: Cel20. Barrett, ‘The written and the world’, passim. 10 Davies, Acts of giving, ch. iv. 11 Wickham, ‘Rural society’, 526. 8 9

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greater social legitimacy in the eyes of the local community was probably at the root of the consistent efforts made by villagers to identify the previous owners of land and property when disposing of such assets, a task made all the easier when the previous owners happened to be family members. The social value of the document, at the most basic level, was twofold: it had to catalogue events, and it also had to coordinate them. Local families spelt out the social geography of their immediate surroundings in order to make sure that its boundaries were not easily traversed. This meant personalising the document with familial detail which was, after all, familiar to neighbours too. Couples traced the lineage of family-owned property, as did individuals, and in the majority of cases it was considered appropriate to place the land and goods being transacted within a social context that was recognisable to the denizens of the village. Leovigildo and Horabona, for example, sold land to an abbot in the 930s which they had received from their parents (or relatives).12 By the same token, Gundesindus’s mother had at some stage been the owner of land that he sold to a certain Aloito in 895, a fact deemed worth mentioning in the charter, indicating that it surely held more than anecdotal value to invoke longstanding patterns of family ownership and to place the land in a local context known to buyer and seller.13 Slightly to the north, in another Sobrado charter, Menendus also stated that his sale was of land inherited from his mother.14 Other members of the family and not just mothers (who happen to be named in all the above examples) passed land on: in 932 Segesinda’s donation to the powerful aristocrat and co-founder of Celanova, Rosendo, was traced back to land that she had obtained from her husband and son.15 To trace land back over several generations possibly lent lustre to the claims of elite individuals, who notably went to some length to stress the family history of land, but this is not an attribute of documentary practice confined solely to one stratum of society.16 Nor was property ownership solely the preserve of individuals or married couples. Joint ownership of land was also possible in other contexts in early medieval Galicia, mother and son presumably tending together to the vineyard that they sold in 923.17 Nepotianus owned an estate with his brother Teodomiro, apparently divided equally between the two.18 And so the pattern goes on. In short, family ties not only framed these transactions but were central to how they were conceptualised and recorded. Property ownership,

‘que hebemus [sic] de parentes nostros’: Cel48 (935). ‘quam habeo de matre mea nomine Gonceria’: Sob81. 14 ‘quam habeo de matre mea Lebura’: Sob73 (883). 15 ‘de uiri mei Suari et filie mee Argilone’: Cel36. 16 Witness Cel11 (916), in which Nepotianus gives to his nephew Rosendo ‘uillas meas proprias quas abemus de auiorum uel parentum nostrorum’. 17 ‘ipsa uinea quam habeo con filio meo Kestremiro’: Cel19. 18 ‘aliam uillam quam dicunt Sala, quod abemus diuisa cum germano nostro Teodomiro, medietatem integram’: Cel11 (916). 12

13

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and the provisions for its preservation or alienation, was in this sense the lifeblood of the village world. The physical landscape As in the Liébana, family was not the only important frame of reference when it came to writing documents, for the landscape also mattered when framing transactions and couching them in appropriate words in early medieval Galicia. Although seen elsewhere, particularly striking in the north-west of the peninsula is the desire to establish the antiquity of claims to property. This is made clearest by the frequent appearance of settlements described in relation to their ‘terminos antiquos’. Variant forms of this phrase emphasise the fact that the land or property being alienated had long been in the hands of the individual or family selling or donating it. Thus we find early examples throughout the Galician documentation, such as that which appears in the oldest charter in the Tumbo, locating a church in settlements already considered to be ancient in 842 (‘uillas antiquas’).19 One example from elsewhere in the region survives on an original parchment dating to 888.20 Early tenth-century examples can also be provided by the Tumbo, and Sobrado furnishes even older uses of this descriptive phrase.21 From slightly further afield, the collection of documents given the title La Coruña by its editors provides an eighth-century example of the use of ‘terminos antiquos’ to describe a claim to land undergoing sale, demonstrating that settled cultivators and churchmen were as much a feature of eighth-century Galicia as they were of the ninth and tenth centuries.22 This example is particularly valuable because it is provided by one of the few ‘single sheets’ (that is, not a cartulary copy).23 Taken together, such examples suggest two things. First, although frequent, references to ‘terminos antiquos’ are far from ubiquitous, indicating that they are not merely illustrative of standard documentary convention; on the contrary, the appearance of these words in charters reflects a genuine conception that land thus described had frequently been settled in the dim and distant past. Second, the appearance of the

Cel1. The formulation is ‘Homnia uobis illum comuto per suos terminos anticos’, and is found in DCO1. 21 ‘per suis terminis antiquiis’: Cel8 (905); ‘per suis terminis antiquis’: Cel11 (916); ‘per suis locis et terminis antiquis’: Cel21 (923); ‘in terminos antiquos’: Sob82 (803); ‘diuidit per suos terminos antiquos’: Sob77 (817). For an early example from northern Portugal see PMH10 (883): ‘per suis terminis antiquis’. On Sobrado and well-established early medieval settlement in that part of Galicia see M. C. Pallares Méndez, El monasterio de Sobrado: un ejemplo de protagonismo monástico en la Galicia medieval, La Coruña 1979. 22 ‘per suis terminis antiquis’: LC1 (788). 23 Castro Correa has recently surmised that the document is a ninth-century copy of a lost original: CDAG4 (788). 19

20

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phrase ‘terminos antiquos’ in charters confirms that any debates concerning the supposed large-scale repopulation of southern and central Galicia in this period, led by a constant stream of pioneering newcomers from beyond the region, are as redundant as those concerned with establishing the dominance of collective ownership among these local societies: families and individuals prized private ownership, the older the better. As Portela Silva and Pallares Méndez have argued, albeit to different ends, settlement patterns seem to have suffered minimal disruption as a result of the Arab-Berber invasion: that the participants in transactions unknowingly emphasised as much by associating their land with ‘terminos antiquos’ points to the fact that the social memory of the community looked to the past to legitimise the acts of the present moment.24 The landscape in which such memories of family and ownership were anchored was one of small hamlets and larger agglomerations more similar to villages. Although it was relatively common to divide up estates into portions or shares, or even to write of parcels of land designated terras, rationes or portiones, the word villa was by far the most common term in the ninth- and tenth-century Celanova charters (as well as in other collections) for describing places of settlement.25 And yet a villa, it seems, could be many things in early medieval Galicia: a territorial designation (a clearly defined settlement space of variable size and nucleation), a proprietorial designation (an individual estate), or a more global term encompassing a village community and the plots and houses of its various inhabitants, spatially organised in less or more dispersed fashion.26 The vast majority of scholars accept that the late Roman villa, the

24 E. Portela Silva and M. C. Pallares Méndez, ‘Galicia, á marxe do Islam: continuidade das estructuras organizativas no tránsito á idade media’, in M. X. Fernández Cerviño and G. Pereira Menaut (eds), Galicia fai dous mil anos, o feito diferencial galego, Santiago de Compostela 1997, i. 435–58, cf. their ‘El lugar de los campesinos: de repobladores a repoblados’, in A. Rodríguez (ed.), El lugar del campesino: en torno a la obra de Reyna Pastor, Valencia 2007, 61–88. 25 For example, ‘de illa nostra ratione’: Cel11 (916); ‘mea portione’: Cel15 (919); ‘terras cultas uel incultas’: Cel37 (932). On the solar, which appears infrequently in the early documents and can be taken to mean ‘parcel or plot of land’, see M. P. Álvarez Maurín, Diplomática asturleonesa: terminología toponímica, León 1994, 328–30. 26 Particularly relevant here are E. Portela Silva and M. C. Pallares Méndez, ‘La villa por dentro: testimonios galaicos de los siglos x y xi’, SHHM xvi (1998), 13–43; M. C. Pallares Méndez, Ilduara, una aristócrata del siglo X, Sada 1998, 36–50; and Davies, Acts of giving, 193–202. A good overview of the metanarratives underpinning various definitions of the village can be found in C. Wickham, ‘La cristalización de la aldea en la Europa Occidental (800–1100)’, in Movimientos migratorios, asentamientos y expansión (siglos VIII–XI): actas de la XXXIV Semana de Estudios Medievales, Pamplona 2007, 33–51. There has been a great deal of archaeological work on early medieval Spanish villages in the past ten years; for Galicia, where early medieval rural archaeology is comparatively underdeveloped, see P. Ballesteros Arias and R. Blanco Rotea, ‘Aldeas y espacios agrarios altomedievales en Galicia’, in Quirós Castillo, The archaeology of early medieval villages, 115–35; cf. Sánchez Pardo, ‘Poblamiento rural tardorromano y altomedieval’.

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often lavish rural retreats of the aristocratic class set within a residential and productive complex of buildings and lands known as a fundus, has little or no relevance to the term villa as and when it crops up in ninth- and tenth-century documents from Galicia, a circumstance also common to the Liébana. Those giving or selling in early medieval Galician settlements are too numerous, and the divergence amongst what is being given or sold too great, to accept that the villa of ninth- and tenth-century documentation was not by this stage a very different entity. Indeed, it has been convincingly argued that the Galician villa of the early Middle Ages was subject to a degree of internal organisation, relative to the productive and habitational needs of the community, which presupposes a population of variable resources and economic status; the majority of the inhabitants worked the land, other inhabitants did not, and in some cases there must also have been villae which contained the residences of the aristocratic groups associated with the monastery.27 The best way to understand what villa might have meant in ninth-century Galicia is to examine the context of its appearance in the documents. Here, land – fields, meadows, vineyards – and the buildings on or near this land – houses, granaries, mills – appear repeatedly in the charters as components of settlements commonly described as villae.28 The documented references to foodstuffs and storehouses, in conjunction with the dozens of charters recording transaction, speak of an intensive farming regime, and viniculture was clearly crucial to the domestic economy of early medieval Galicia, with vineyards appearing in some of the very earliest charters to survive, and abundantly in later ones.29 Orchards likewise flourished in the lush farmland of ninth-century Galicia, as did all sorts of fruit trees.30 Animals are easy enough to find in the documents too, and were sometimes used to meet prices set out in transactions, indicating that mixed farming was the norm in this corner of the peninsula.31 To aid travel between the patchwork of farms and estates that dotted the landscape, 27 See Portela Silva and Pallares Méndez, ‘La Villa por dentro’. These authors have shown via detailed analysis of the descriptions given in the Rabal charters, used in conjunction with aerial photography and map-work, that the territorial boundaries of the village of Rabal in its tenth-century form substantially coincide with those of the modern-day feligresía of San Salvador de Rabal. 28 Large houses could have all of these outbuildings and sometimes listed them along with the tools needed for farming: ‘domos, edificia, ferramenta’: Cel3 (871); ‘domos, orrea, cellaria, quoquina et molendium cum omnibus intrinsecus domorum ipsorum, cupos, cupas, ferramenta’: Sob123 (867). 29 For early examples see ‘fecit uineas et casas multas’: Cel1 (842); ‘tam terras quam uineas’: Cel1 (856); ‘ipsa uinea in territorio Tybris’: Cel20 (923). 30 ‘uel omnem pomiferam et arbusta, fructuosas uel infructuosas’: Cel 2 (856); ‘alias terras et pomares: Cel3 (871); ‘pumares, figares, morares’: Cel35 (931); ‘pumares, cersares, nogares, ficares, auellanares’: Cel37 (932). 31 ‘uaccas, boues, kaballos, equas, mulos, oues’: Cel3 (871); ‘asna pullata’: Cel5 (879); ‘xxv solidos gallicenses in pannos uel argento et boves’: Cel8 (905). See Davies, ‘Sale, price and valuation’, 165–70; cf. Jarrett, ‘Bovo soldare’, passim.

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roads and byways were also used, as the documents attest.32 All of this farming and animal husbandry nevertheless took place in a landscape described in very human coordinates by local inhabitants.33 This is sometimes made manifest by explicit reference to the homes of neighbours, or even to land or property owned by third parties not involved in the transaction.34 Previous owners of land were also identified in some charters.35 Why the human coordinates of these sales or donations were mapped out like this is no great mystery: for the documents to be useful they needed to capture the specific details of every deal in ways useful to the transacting parties. Who owned what and where were the details which transformed template documents into living conduits of social memory. Hence a Sobrado charter shows Egico locate his field (‘agrum meum’) in relation to the dwelling place of the transactors with whom he is dealing, specifying further that he refers to ‘that field between the Church of St Julian and the castro [that is, hillfort] of Paredinas’, both of them significant markers of physical and social geography.36 Hillforts conjure up an image more redolent of the time of Hydatius than of Egico and his friends, but the castro – an imposing feature of the landscape, often visible from considerable distances – seems to have shaped the conception of social space in early medieval Galicia. Witness the clearly rich Fernanda Gudesteiz, who sold two churches to the priest Homar in 905, one of which was situated by the foot of the local hillfort, presumably unoccupied by this period but none the less a useful point of reference.37 Locating property in this way was not uncommon, but apart from the ubiquity of the term uilla, no hard and fast rule fixed the expression of the location of lands or assets undergoing transaction. Rather, variety within an array of optional modes of expression held sway in the minds of buyers, sellers and scribes, who between them mediated a charter’s content. For instance, an ‘inter domum Babdemiri et karrale qui discurrit ad Barga’: Cel33 (931); ‘in carrale antiqua’: Cel37 (932). 33 A colourful and impressionistic reimagining of this world can be found in Baliñas Pérez, Gallegos del año mil, ch. v. 34 Some examples of references to houses are ‘uilla tercias duas integras in domos’: Cel13 (918); ‘in domos’: Cel14 (919); ‘de ipso casare’: Cel19 (923); ‘mea ratione propria in casare’: Cel22 (924); cf. ‘domos, et cellarios cum cupos et cupas’: Cel7 (889). Note also in this charter a wine press (‘torcular’) and a mill (‘molinum in flumine Eyres’). Some references to the homes of others: ‘super domos Eldemiri usque ad arborem et usque ad limitem de agro Ierici’: Sob80 (887); ‘inter domum Babdemiri et karrale’: Cel33 (931); ‘alia uilla ubi habitat Tanquila’; Cel34 (931). 35 ‘que fuit de Ramiru et de Manuel’: Cel45 (935); ‘habeo de mea auia, que fuit filia Avolini’: Cel46 (935). 36 ‘agrum meum quem habeo in uilla Codegio ubi vos habitatis … inter ecclesiam sanctum Iulianum et castrum de Paredinas’: Sob83 (827). 37 ‘sub crepidine montium Castro Uemes’: Cel8 (905); ‘super castro Litorie, in loco predicto Felgarias’: Cel21 (923); ‘sub castro Brione’: Sob43 (818); cf. ‘subtus monte Toro’: Cel25 (927). 32

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especially detailed description of location invokes the very ‘limits’ of Galicia to describe the wider geographical context in which the church of San Pedro de Laroá was founded.38 References to the larger political territories in which churches or villages are situated also find their way into the charters, although not as often as do references to certain geographical features, such as rivers.39 It is interesting though, that use of the term ‘territorio’ is noticeably more common in early Galician charters than it is in early documents from the Liébana, perhaps suggesting that the conceptual horizons of early medieval Galicians were less restricted than those of the Lebaniegos, who toiled in the shadows of impassable mountains: some small worlds, it would seem, were smaller than others. Help and hardship Statements describing location or family background were included in documents so as to make illicit claims to title by third parties less likely: that is, the essential job of such statements was to spell out who owned what and where.40 But family members also assisted their relatives in more concrete ways. To stand in for an absent, incapacitated or perhaps functionally illiterate member of one’s family shows a degree of elasticity in these arrangements which speaks of the need to sidestep potential problems. It is in this context that the appearance of individuals acting as guarantors for others can probably be explained, such as Uistragildus, who represented his mother at a sale in 842.41 In 934 Honorigo was one of several individuals who had agreed to stand in for presumably absent relatives in a donation to Busiano.42 Family and friends were charged with helping out those in need in other contexts: one such was by acting as sureties in court, effectively affirming the good character

‘in finibus Galletie, territorio Limie, subtus montes Larauco, discurrente ribulo Laragie’: Cel10 (909). 39 The examples given here are not exhaustive but merely illustrative. For ‘territory’ in early charters: ‘in territorio Presares’: Cel3 (871); ‘territorio Limie’: Cel10 (909); ‘in territorio Ualladares’: Cel11 (916); ‘in territorio inter Arnogia et Limia’: Cel18 (922); ‘territorio Bubalense’: Cel23 (925). Rivers in early charters: ‘iuxta flumen Mandeum’: Sob82 (803); ‘in ripa Mandeo’: Sob84 (878); ‘super ripam Minei’: Cel1 (842); ‘iuxta fluuio Tamare’: Cel3 (871); ‘secus riuulo Laure’: Cel6 (886); ‘iuxta fluuio Tamares’: Cel7 (889); ‘iuxta flumen Minei’: Cel11 (916). 40 For example, ‘mea heriditate quam habeo de matre mea’: Sob81. 41 ‘Uistragildus cognomento Gotinus qui fui fidiador de uice persone matris mee pro ipsas terras supranominatas uinea et pumares uendere et precium prendere manu mea feci’: Sob34. 42 ‘Honorigo et frater meus Astruario, pro nos et pro omnes nostros germanos et heredes … Crizila a persona de mea muliere’: Cel43. 38

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of loved ones or vouching for them when mired in difficulties.43 Sometimes the need for material assistance was made clear too, as was its recompense. Pompeianus’ donation to his son of the fifth part of an estate ‘that could be put to human use’ (‘dono uobis quintam portionem integram quantum ad prestitum hominis est’) was essentially a strategy of preserving family-owned land, yet this scriptura donationis also commemorated his son’s good-natured help around the home.44 Desperate times also called for desperate measures. Thus Framila was given a quarter of a house by Gondesondo in 924 in payment for support that the former had lent the latter in a moment of hardship.45 These sorts of actions point more towards peasants taking the initiative by looking to peers and to the social support network of the village in times of difficulty than they do towards exploitation; whether by formal mechanism such as suretyship, or by charity, social stability depended upon local support and tight-knit community spirit. That some individuals – Framila, for example – stood to gain from these arrangements, does not mean that society was coming apart at the seams; on the contrary, neighbours and family offered help to each other in medieval Galicia, as they do today, but rarely if ever was the motive purely altruistic. Help was necessary because great divergences of wealth characterised the ninth- and early tenth-century village world. At the bottom end of the social scale, there were those who served others in a variety of contexts, but finding a clear path through the terminological morass witnessed in the charters is extremely complicated.46 Language which at first glance appears to denote slavery often conceals a more complex reality: it has been shown, for instance, that terms such as servitium and homines need not betoken servility.47 Dependence, none the less, was undoubtedly a fact of life for some. But were the unfree whom we witness in the early Galician documents chattel slaves, to all intents and purposes the property of their owners, and denied all legal, social and economic rights? Or were they domestic servants entrusted with the upkeep of house, home and its inhabitants? Or were they serfs tied to the obligations that they owed to their lord, but still to some degree in control of their own labour? For Marxist historians, the distinction between slave and ‘eo quod levavimus nostro filio per fidiatura’: Sob29 (931). For wider context see W. Davies, ‘On suretyship in tenth-century northern Iberia’, in J. Escalona Monge and A. Reynolds (eds), Scale and scale change in the early Middle Ages, Turnhout 2011, 133–52. 44 ‘Propterea enim damus uobis nore mee et filio meo Fafilani quia per multum tempus habitastis mecum et multum et bonum seruicium mihi fecistis’: Sob77 (817). On this family see Baliñas Pérez, Gallegos del año mil, 123–6. 45 ‘pane et uino qui guuernasti me in anno malo’: Cel22. On this material see R. Portass ‘Rethinking the small worlds of tenth–century Galicia’, SHHM xxxi (2013), 83–103. 46 A point made with vehemence in both W. Davies, ‘On servile status in the early Middle Ages’, in M. L. Bush (ed.), Serfdom and slavery: studies in legal bondage, London 1996, 225–46, and Isla Frez, Sociedad gallega, 203–4. 47 ‘Service could encompass, but did not necessarily denote, servitude’: Davies, ‘On servile status’, 228; cf. Isla Frez, Sociedad gallega, 204. 43

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serf is modal and thus characterised by the different ‘economic logic’ underpinning the slave economy and the feudal economy respectively, but numerous case studies have shown that to make such a clear distinction is fraught with dangers.48 The words used to designate the unfree in early Galician charters are in fact various, but the contexts in which they appear provide clues to the reality of servile status in this period. The most commonly seen word in the charters to describe unfree individuals is servus (normally rendered in the accusative plural as servos: but then those who could afford to keep slaves in all likelihood needed more than one). Thus Argemiro and others included servos in a large donation that they made to Alfonso iii in 886, and, in a northern Portuguese case from a decade or so later, arrangements were made to free servos as an act of aristocratic goodwill.49 Similarly, the northern Galician aristocrat Hermenegildo received a huge fine from a freewoman, Letasia, who admitted to adulterous fornication with one of his slaves, a certain Ataulfo, a crime that she compounded with theft.50 Slaves of Moorish descent were included in Count Gutier’s morning gift to his wife Ilduara in the 910s, and there are cases of other individuals making large donations to their wives which included servile dependants; some of these gifts tallied exactly with the stipulations provided by the Visigothic Law.51 What this means in practice is that ten boys and ten girls were given in donation as part of the marriage contract; there are early examples of this occurrence in the Celanova and Sobrado charters.52 Context here urges caution, however. All the individuals seen in possession of servos or pueros/puellas in the documents cited appear to be extremely rich and to have enjoyed considerable social prestige of one sort or another, be it judicial, comital or simply derived from their wealth. Such large householders and landowners would have been in need of domestic staff and tied labour on their lands; which service the servos, pueros and puellas performed in the cases examined here cannot be known for certain, yet it is surely more likely that boys and girls gifted by husbands to their wives in nuptial contracts were domestic servants rather than unfree labourers set to work on estates. Further complications arise when words like servos appear juxtaposed in charters with other terms widely thought to connote servile labour: what, for example, can be made of the ‘seruos etiam meos vel ancillas’ given to the monastery of Almerezo by Bishop Rudesindus in 867?53 Some distinction Davies, ‘On servile status’, 226–32; cf. Chris Wickham’s statement on distinctions between levels of unfreedom in Framing the early Middle Ages, 259–65. 49 Cel 6; and ‘engenuamos nostros serbos’: PMH12 (897). 50 ‘commiscui me in adulterio cum servo Hermenegildi nomine Ataulfo’: Sob75 (858). 51 ‘in seruos uel origine Maurorum’: Cel12 (916); LV iii. i. vi. 52 ‘in dotis titulum decem pueros …. similiter puellas decem’: Sob119 (887); ‘do atque concedo tibi in huius dotis titulo pueros X … puellas X’: Cel24 (926). 53 Sob123. 48

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between the two terms used in Rudesindus’ charter can be supposed, but was it simply one of gender, with Rudesindus separating his dependants into male servants and slave girls, or was it also qualitative? Although it is impossible to be sure, the indications are that servos in the contexts of these documents were either domestic servants in grand houses or on great estates, thereby escaping the ‘social death’ implied by ‘classic’ slavery, or else serfs who retained some rights, as the documents sometimes make clear. These rights were far from total, however, and were sometimes subject to certain constraints, as Rudesindus’ charter makes plain: in this instance the bishop was able to offer his servos to a monastery, albeit ‘sub patrocinio’ of the brothers, and this in spite of having previously appeared to offer them their freedom.54 Even more strangely, Rudesindus’ servos and ancillas seem to have been granted the right to ensure that they were not treated in an unjust manner thereafter: the charter indeed provides that they might choose a different patron if the brothers oppressed them.55 Neither slave nor serf classically conceived, these dependants experienced levels of autonomy which none the less correspond more closely with serfdom than slavery. This much is also suggested by another Sobrado document. Nunilu’s donation to Hermenegildo and Paterna, the major landowning family of north-central Galicia in the late ninth and early tenth century, was of land that belonged to his family but had arrived in its possession because it had once formed part of the holdings of a servant or serf.56 The servile were therefore dependent in some measure, but they were more than the entirely powerless objects of their owners, at least on occasion: as these two examples show, some could and did own property, and others were protected from excessively severe treatment.57 The information provided by charters cannot provide a comprehensive survey of the composition of society, so total numbers or proportions of dependants are not known; the impression given by the charters from both regions studied here, however, suggests that there was a larger servile population in Galicia than there was in the Liébana. The question then becomes why this was so. Again, allowing for caveats, the early charter evidence from both regions indicates that from an earlier time Galicia was home to a more densely proprietorial society, where patterns of land-ownership were essentially those which, in their basic outlines, had emerged in the post-Roman centuries. These communities suffered little disruption from outwith in the eighth century and were situated in a landscape which lent itself to extensive cultivation: in these

Rudesindus was in this instance acting in accordance with the requirements of canon law: Concilios visigóticos e hispanorromanos,Tol. III. 55 ‘sicut eos iam per alia scriptura liberos esse constitui … Que sicut etiam decreui si aliquis ex illis eso superflue uiolenter oppresserit, licitum sit illis de eo qui illos iniuste attriuerit reccedere et ei qui eos modauerit reconferre’. 56 ‘et ille habuit de suo seruo’: Sob63 (877). 57 This is discussed in Portass, ‘Rethinking’, 94–6. 54

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circumstances entrepreneurial instincts flourished and sharp social hierarchies became sharper still. Peasant sale If the servile element of society represented its lowliest constituency, then the small-scale proprietor perhaps represented its most typical. Individuals who formed part of this varied group are visible in charters of donation, sale and exchange. Subsistence farming must have been all that some could aspire to, but there is abundant evidence that this was not the case for everybody. Just as in the Liébana, the Galician charters show that land was regularly transferred between the inhabitants of villages in the west. One particular scribal formula evidenced in the Sobrado material and elsewhere makes it clear that land was being bought as well as inherited, and that this process was in train in central Galicia by the ninth century.58 For the area slightly further to the south in what would come to be the heartlands of the monastery of Celanova, the early charters offer fewer clues, but it is none the less clear that purchase was an established method of obtaining property in this society.59 The rootedness of sale in the Celanova region is consistent with patterns observable in the Liébana, such that settled cultivators bought from and sold to each other in relation to their needs and wants; none the less, a look at the numbers helps to put the extension of sale in context. Fourteen of the fifty-two Celanova charters from before the monastery’s foundation record sales, accounting for over a quarter of all charters from this period.60 Yet these fourteen documents likely do not reflect the totality of business of this sort, for why would the monastery have kept documents which recorded sales of land that did not end up in its property portfolio? More compelling still, alongside the unknowable numbers of lost documents which recorded sales of no interest to the monastery’s custodians, there are plenty of references in the extant charters to land transfers which have not survived in documentary form.61 These references indicate that limits to the transfer of property were not set by social standing. Medium-level peasants – respectable members of the ‘tan de parentibus quam de comparatione’: Sob72 (858); ‘de nostris parentibus sive et de nostro comparato’: Sob54 (930). For a slightly later example see ‘tam de comparato quam de ganato’: Sob70 (941). 59 ‘alias terras et pomares quod comparamus de Sindina et Sunillone in Roboreto…et pomare quod comparavimus in Quastidiano de Teoderi’: Cel3 (871). 60 Sales: Cel5 (879); Cel8 (905); Cel16 (922); Cel19 (923); Cel20 (923); Cel22 (924); Cel33 (931); Cel37 (932); Cel39 (934); Cel41 (934); Cel45 (935); Cel46 (935); Cel48 (935); Cel49 (935). 61 ‘que fuit de Ramiru et de Manuel’: Cel45 (935); ‘quam habemus comparata de Daniele’: Cel33 (931); ‘ipsa uinea quem comparauimus de Tanoi’: Cel48 (935); ‘quem habeo de abios et parentibus meis siue de comparatum’: Cel14 (919); cf. ‘villam quam obtinuit Felix’: Sob124 (860). 58

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village community such as Fafila – actively acquired land by purchasing it from others, as did those who appear to have been less wealthy.62 More modest owners necessarily assumed a greater risk when buying or selling: Ulidi, for example, felt it necessary to accept a cow and its calf in exchange for ‘terras’ and ‘arbores fructuosas et infructuousas’ located on estates held by his family near the river Tambre.63 On occasions such as these the spectre of poverty must have sometimes been a factor in transactions. And yet the indications are that worsening conditions between the haves and the have-nots of the village world were not always the cause of transactions which seem otherwise inexplicable. For although a small-scale operator (he does not appear again in the Sobrado cartulary), Ulidi’s decision to make a sale to Paterna, wife of the powerful lord Hermenegildo, might reflect a calculated risk aimed at winning patronage. In these circumstances, peasants making sales rather than donations to powerful individuals actually points to the relative stability of their condition, as well as the acquisitive instinct that guided their choices. In any case, in the Liébana, social considerations related to prestige, patronage and protection framed all economic motives in this period. In other words, who one sold to and bought from was informed by myriad concerns: advantage from transaction could arrive in tangible form, but it was also available in the social capital that association with powerful people could bring. The maximisation of self-interest – if such a thing existed at all in this period – was indeed driven more by social imperatives than rational economic calculation: the social and the economic were imbricated in every transaction.64 In some instances, to secure the favour of local elites must have seemed a prize worth attaining even if it meant losing some landed resources in the short to medium term, as Ulidi was prepared to do. Similar motives probably lie behind the sale that Ascarigo made to Rosendo in the 930s of two-ninths of the fishing rights that he owned in the Miño.65 Tellingly, alongside sales to the rich and powerful, a few transactions enacted between peasants also survive, showing beyond question that peasants bought and sold from their peers and neighbours.66 So abundant are these transactions across northern Spain, and so little evidence is there of coercion, that it must be the case that it was possible for peasants to relinquish their hold on land and to avoid ruin in the process; peasant choice and agency were not wholly negated by wider structural imbalance. In this climate, the value of documents could only increase, and sometimes transactors emphasised that they had written proof of their prior purchases too, For Fafila’s purchase see ‘quintam portionem que habuit comparatam de patre nostro Ponpeiano’: Sob76 (860). For the less wealthy see Cel20 (923), in which a quarter of a vineyard was sold for three pieces of cloth. 63 Sob93 (934). 64 Feller, Gramain and Weber, La Fortune de Karol, 6–7. 65 ‘rationes in piscarias nostras proprias quos habemus in riuulo Minei … duas nonas integras’: Cel46 (935). 66 Cel19 (923); Cel22 (924). 62

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hence Leodemirus and his wife’s statement in a charter of 922 to this effect: ‘que comparavimus per scripturam de filios Froisende et Theodeberti’.67 Some individuals were also prepared to give away land that they had previously gone to the trouble of paying for, confirming that social as well as economic considerations shaped the nature of business in this period: for example, Recesindo donated land to Gutier and Ilduara, titled aristocrats from the family that founded Celanova, in order to win their patronage in the 920s; all the same, this must have been a sought-after prize because Recesindo was renouncing his share of pasture land previously bought from named neighbours, Zensoi, Sisualdo and Bonimiro.68 Godegia, or at least the scribe who wrote his charter, went to the trouble of stating twice in the same document that land he was donating to a social better had been bought from a certain Quilafonso.69 That people bought land in order to alienate it at an opportune later moment sheds light on the strategic thinking that shaped some transaction in this period: some individuals invested in land, only to use this land to invest in social capital. The crucial point here is that land changed hands regularly between the middling ranks of the village world; as in the Liébana, ownership of land was prized by all and sundry, and transactions were not solely the preserve of the rich. Furthermore, although these references do not lend themselves to statistical analysis, they are incrementally compelling: they hint at a culture of buying and selling that was deeply ingrained in society. The surviving references are merely the tip of the iceberg too. Guntine, for example, is just one of many individuals who bought land in a transaction for which no written evidence survives save a passing reference; in other words, we only know that it took place due to its brief mention in another document.70 Likewise, Reperato and his wife Trasvinda made a donation to Rosendo just before Celanova’s foundation which included land and orchards inherited and bought from others, a fact knowable to us simply because it is mentioned in passing in the donation charter.71 The language of sale was sometimes less explicit too, with a less precise language of acquisition emerging in its place; a peasant named Felix, for example, seems to have been an assiduous consolidator of property who was prepared to take some form of direct action to expand his estates and to obtain land when necessary or desirable, but precisely how he went about this must remain opaque.72 There are indications, indeed, that outright purchase was not always necessary; sometimes ninth-century individuals seem to have taken a calculated gamble on exchange. This is the impression given Sob25. ‘in busto que habeo comparato de Zensoi, Sisualdo et Bonemiro’: Cel21 (923). 69 ‘pumare quod habeo comparatum de Quilafonso …. sicut illam comparavi de iam supradicto Quilafonso’: Sob53 (931). 70 ‘quam ibidem abebat comparatum’: Cel23 (925). 71 ‘Adicimus uobis etiam terras et pomares … que comparauimus’: Cel52 (936). 72 ‘et pumares quos Felix ibi plantavit’: Sob124 (860), and, within the same charter, ‘villam quam obtinuit Felix’. 67

68

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by a single-sheet document from the La Coruña collection, in which a ‘terra similem tanta’ in Negrarios was exchanged for one thought to be more or less equivalent (‘recepit eius similem tanta’) in Relis.73 Ingenuity and dynamism, in other words, allowed peasants to work in their own interests in what must have been a world in which the possibility of self-improvement was very real. In sum, there can be no doubt that buying land, as well as obtaining it by other means, was a quotidian aspect of Galician life at all levels of society in the ninth and early tenth centuries. How all of this buying and selling was made possible has been the subject of considerable debate, but the rarity of metal-based notions of value in Celanova charters must indicate that little coinage changed hands as a result of these transactions.74 Price was met in a variety of ways and could include animals, clothes and foodstuffs, but it was also largely dependent on context: three sacks of grain were worth only as much as the size of the sacks, the quality of the grain, and its abundance in any given moment dictated. In some measure, therefore, price reflected the particular circumstances in which the two parties undertaking a given transaction found themselves, but such transactions were not for this reason any less commercial, nor price any less keenly debated. Negotiation was no doubt central to the arrival at an acceptable price; but relative status must likewise have affected the leverage that parties could bring to the table: as in the Liébana, the economic was shaped by the social, and a land market facilitated the circulation of land and property.75 The workings of this market cannot be described in detail because the documents are neither sufficiently abundant nor detailed to shed light on its more complex features: yet there can be no doubt that although this ‘was an utterly rural economy’ it was at the same time one governed by the constant movement of land and appurtenances.76 Commercial exchange, facilitated by payment in a range of goods movable and immovable, was woven into the very fabric of this society. Impressionistic similarities with documents found in larger collections from across Europe point in the same direction: in much of ninth- and tenth-century Europe, client networks, forged by the audacity of individuals prepared to dabble in the land market, prevailed.77 How status affected social relations also requires some discussion. Despite the differences in status that one can safely assume between, for example, Rosendo’s parents and the bulk of the peasant population, the economic relationships between the inhabitants of this world are far from clear. None LC8 (878). Davies, ‘Sale, price and valuation’, 166–70. 75 For a similar line to that taken here see F. Menant, ‘Comment le marché de la terre est devenu un theme de recherché pour les historiens du moyen âge’, in Feller and Wickham, Le Marché de la terre, 195–216. 76 Davies, ‘Sale, price and valuation’, 172. 77 See the transactions described by Feller, Gramain and Weber in La Fortune de Karol, annexes. These authors worked with material which allowed them to ‘reconstituer un prix unitaire de la terre’, an impossible task with the Spanish material. 73 74

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the less, the impression given by the documents is of a world composed mostly of allodialists, property-owning peasants who seem to have enjoyed very high levels of freedom when set against a pan-European context. Given the wealth of certain individuals whose lives are captured in the charters, teneurial arrangements must also have been common, with the rich setting the less fortunate to work on their land. Yet although respect was afforded to the rules of contract, rents were rarely enshrined in written documentation in the ninth and tenth centuries.78 What then, did each transaction entail for the parties involved? At this stage, rather little: indeed when most payments were made we should not imagine that ‘lifelong, enforceable commitment, or a life of subjection’ followed in their wake: business was business, and some fared better than others.79 Abbot and count, peasant proprietor and dependent farmer, and an ambitious middling rentier stratum peopled this landscape, giving the impression that this was a society marked by social variegation of greater extremes than we saw in the Liébana: the rich here may have indeed been richer, the poor poorer. But the fluidity with which land changed hands shows that the small business of the nuclear family remained a going concern for individuals of diverse means. Rural life: work and prayer It is now apposite to draw these findings together. Before 936, and – for that matter – afterwards, the two central human preoccupations in Galicia were work and prayer. Everyday life coalesced around these two activities, which informed the business conducted by all members of society: the buying, selling and praying which held lives and communities together were predicated upon the expectation of individual gain and the hope of personal or familial salvation. In this sense Galicia was like much of northern Iberian society in this period, and evidence of these similarities is copious. The patterns of village life documented in records such as Godesteus’ sale of five cuartarios’ worth of sown fields to Abbot Absalon, or Helaguntia’s large donation of various buildings and goods in the vicinity of Sobrado, bring to mind the same obligations and motives which governed life in the Liébana.80 And this fundamental similarity between the two regions is also true of the basic patterns of property ownership. The land that Godesteus sold to Abbot Absalon was his own private property; he was a small-scale allodialist of the sort seen in great numbers of documents from across the peninsula.81 In this instance the land in question bordered The fines received by Hermenegildo and Paterna, the powerful lay couple whose holdings formed the basis of Sobrado’s patrimony, are not to be confused with rents. See, for example, Sob54 (930) and Sob21 (931). 79 Davies, Acts of giving, 156. 80 Cel5 (879) and Sob124 (860). 81 Davies, Acts of giving, passim. 78

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the abbot’s own (‘iuxta uestra terra’), perhaps indicating that Absalon was looking to consolidate further his monastery’s holdings with his purchase from Godesteus. Yet however the abbot’s motivations are interpreted, the standard formulae of the charter indicate that such activity was already perfectly normal. The charter in fact reads precisely as one would expect: the opening clause is simple, identifying the persons involved in the sale before framing it in typical language; a price is then stated as agreeable to both parties, before a warning clause admonishes would-be transgressors of the deal. The eschatocol lists those present when the charter was drawn up and assigns it a date. That there is nothing unusual or suspect about this document is precisely why it is so interesting; the activity it records was normal, and adding to one’s holdings or disposing of one’s assets necessitated documents which facilitated these processes. There is, of course, the question of the vendor’s motive to consider too. The need to make ends meet might have convinced Godesteus to make his sale; but he might just as soon have considered it a worthwhile short-term loss of resources provided that it brought with it entry into the loose network of patronage over which Absalon presided.82 Loose because nothing suggests that Godesteus gave up or renounced any freedoms by making this deal: if Godesteus was on the lookout for short-term advantage, Absalon’s offer might have represented an opportunity and nothing more onerous. The pool of cultivated land was clearly undergoing expansion in this period. Trasavara made a sale to Kinquila and Guntina of half of ‘his own vineyard’ (‘uineam nostram propriam’) and also some uncultivated land there which could presumably be put to use by the buyers (‘et terra calua qui ibidem iacet’), and references to uncultivated land pepper the documents.83 Were such uncultivated land unusable one supposes that the vendor would not have found a buyer, so it appears that peasants like Trasavara simply owned land that they chose not to farm or lacked the resources or labour to farm themselves, indicating that the stock image of the peasant proprietor desperately clinging to existence is in at least some instances questionable. And why not sell land if it was not needed? Savvy individuals fully cognisant of the backbreaking labour involved in farming parcels of land sufficient to meet their needs would have realised that opportunities to benefit from sale should not be allowed to go to waste: after all, as Chayanov’s peasant life-cycle thesis surmised, villagers needed varying resources in different moments. Although the historiography tends to pass entirely over this possibility, certain entrepreneurial peasant farmers may even have planted and farmed hither and thither with the intention of making later sales. Trasuario and Savildi, for example, sold a vineyard in what is now Terra de Trives, a neighbouring comarca to Celanova, which they had themselves planted, tended and later sold on (‘de uinea nostra

He is also seen in another document, Cel2 (856), where he is the nominated abbot of the monastic community of Santa Eulalia, founded by pactual agreement. 83 Cel19 (923) is one good example. 82

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propria quam abemus de nostro laborato’).84 On another occasion a peasant couple made a sale of land inherited from their parents (‘quem habemus de parentibus nostris’) which included an orchard and some vines fenced off from uncultivated land ripe for exploitation (‘ipso pumare qui iacet sub ipsas uineas quomodo est concluso cum suas terras callvas’).85 Transactions like these were regular but necessarily pragmatic affairs, sometimes requiring only the solemnity that witnesses could provide.86 Finding individuals in the charters who worked, bought or sold land is easy enough, but alongside labouring in fields, praying for loved ones also mattered. Helaguntia’s large-scale donation of land and church buildings recognised the religious inspiration that moved her, Baroncellus and Visflavara to make such an offering: she aimed to secure her relatives’ souls when they were granted an audience before the Lord.87 In a similar vein, religiosity pervades one of the most interesting ninth-century charters to survive.88 The oldest Celanova document, from 842, tells the story of Abbot Astrulfo and the members of his congregation, who donated all of their possessions to the monastery of Santa María de Barreto, over which the abbot presided.89 The charter’s language is unusually florid and suffused with Christian imagery, and the document points to wellestablished settlements in the region. Abbot Astrulfo traced the foundation of his community’s extensive assets (including several churches and plots of land) back to his uncle Abbot Senior (‘domnus Seniorinus tius meus’): Senior and his brothers took possession of what was already an ancient place when the document was written (‘et cum suos fratres prehendidit locum antiquum’), and brought land into cultivation (‘et quicquid squalidauit domnus Seniorinus tius meus’), work and prayer on this occasion in unison. Interestingly, by 941, Senior’s possessions had found their way into the ownership of Ramiro ii (931–51), and the antiquity of their provenance and even grander scale is made explicit.90 As early as the documents take us, then, there is evidence for a Cel20 (923). Cel49 (935). 86 For example, Cel41 (934), in which Onildi’s sale to the priest Piniolo of land in Folgoso concluded with the help of witnesses who saw the division of land take place: ‘ipsa terra … per ubi tibi illam determinauimus et coram testibus adsignauimus’. 87 ‘pro remedio animarum parentum nostrorum Hermiari et Goldragatoni, ut illorum eueniat coronam et misericordiam gratuitam ante Dominum’. 88 This religiosity is made most obvious by the colourful variation on a stock warning clause that appears towards the end of the charter, pouring opprobrium on would-be wrongdoers such that they find ‘themselves excluded from the catholic faith and the holy communion and take their lot with the traitor Judas’ (‘et extraneus sit a fide catholica et a sancta communione et cum Iuda traditore abeat portionem’). 89 Cel1. 90 Cel69. Senior’s wealth and church-building activity can be compared with that of Ricimer, a Visigothic aristocrat of the seventh-century Bierzo; it is suggestive that the scales of their wealth are not dissimilar. For Ricimer see the Ordo Querimoniae, in Valerio of Bierzo (Aherne edn), 80–5. 84 85

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strikingly wealthy elite stratum in southern Galicia, a disparate group perhaps but one visible in a range of charters and hagiographical sources. Not all of those moved by piety were quite as wealthy as Astrulfo, but this did not prevent them from happening upon ingenious ways in which to make the most of their circumstances. Pactual agreements in Galicia, as in Cantabria, allowed small communities of individuals to pool their property for the benefit of everyone, even if the harsh rules which characterised such agreements make it clear that order and security were the object of these arrangements.91 Yet that each individual forswore his or her claim to private property in order to enter into a pactual arrangement shows how normal private ownership was. In fact the acquisitorial instinct pervaded all sections of society; private ownership was consubstantial with healthy social relations – indeed, as Aristotle had argued, it made them possible.92 Buying, selling, exchanging and donating marked the rhythms of life: only when a monastic foundation set about assembling a property portfolio of its own were these rhythms altered.

Cel2 (856) and Cel4 (871). Aristotle, The politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair, London 1962, ii.v.

91

92

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7

Rosendo, Celanova and the Village World, 936–1031 An understanding of the social dynamics of the village world from 936 to 1031, the subject of this chapter, is founded upon a rich corpus of peasant sales. Typical of these sales was that which took place on 7 February 962, when Ermegoto and his sons sold their share of a vineyard in the village of Rabal to Rosendo and the monks of Celanova, receiving in turn four modios in grain and unspecified goods.1 On this occasion Ermegoto and his sons dealt with one of the most important political fixers of the region, as well as what was effectively the house monastery of one of the kingdom’s most powerful families.2 Their decision to sell, all the same, likely reflected careful deliberation – a weighing up of the benefits and drawbacks occasioned by the deal in land, food and social capital. A range of considerations must have informed all such transactions, and peasants had to be strategic insofar as circumstances allowed: after all, such benefits and drawbacks could have variable short-, medium- and long-term consequences, many of which were hard to foresee and difficult to predict. Yet these were the conditions of quotidian human interaction in tenthcentury Galicia: every transaction brought with it an element of risk and none would have been undertaken lightly, for there was simply too much at stake. Remarkable, then, that buying and selling continued to pervade all corners of society before, throughout, and beyond the tenth century, a conclusion rendered unassailable by the surviving documentation. Be that as it may, once Celanova’s agents began in the 960s to take a more proactive and persistent approach towards the acquisition of land in Rabal, the tectonic plates on which this particular ‘small world’ rested underwent realignment. Every sale thereafter further altered the balance of risk for the transacting parties: the more Rabal’s peasants sold to the monastery, the more difficult it became for their neighbours to resist the offers of Celanova’s agents. This was not simply the result of the coercive or bargaining power that Celanova enjoyed thanks to its superior resources, which dwarfed those of all members of village society. Geographical and (increasing) psychological proximity to the village also worked to the monastery’s advantage, its agents

Cel145. From the foundation of Celanova in 936 until Rosendo’s death in 977, Rosendo is explicitly named either as the sole or joint recipient of donation, or one party of a compraventa, in approximately seventy documents. 1 2

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establishing a frequent presence in the vicinity by dint of their regular and welldocumented visits to the community. Celanova was a mere eight kilometres south of Rabal, and many villagers had already sold to it in the two years prior to Ermegoto’s sale, leading to the cumulative creation of a portfolio of fields, plots and vineyards which saw the monastery assume a dominant local presence. How peasants reacted to the newly assertive presence of Celanova in their midst is uncovered in what follows. First, numbers. Thirty-five Rabal charters spanning the years 956 to 997 allow an examination of village life in the shadow of Celanova during these crucial decades: of these, thirty are sales made to Rosendo, Celanova or both.3 In the eleventh century to 1031 the cartulary furnishes a few more Rabal charters, including sales and exchanges.4 Few villages in medieval Spain, perhaps none, are as well-documented in the tenth century, yet in many respects Rabal’s charters are not unusual; therein in fact lies their value, for they share enough similarities with the matters recorded in transactions from other, less well-documented villages that they can be used as a good approximate guide to village life in southern Galicia.5 But the ‘visibility’ of Rabal brings with it certain pitfalls, exposing it to the perils of caricature and cliché. And at this juncture a well-trodden historiographical path indeed emerges: peasant sale on the scale witnessed in Rabal is taken to connote sweeping social change, set in motion in the tenth century before reaching maturation in the eleventh.6 Such change is diagnosed very generally as the beginnings of the mass subjection of the peasantry, that is, the beginnings of a Sales from 956 to the end of the tenth century: Cel117 (956); Cel118 (956); Cel128 (960); Cel129 (961); Cel130 (961); Cel131 (961); Cel132 (961); Cel133 (961); Cel134 (961); Cel135 (961); Cel136 (961); Cel137 (961); Cel138 (961); Cel139 (961); Cel140 (961); Cel143 (961); Cel145 (962); Cel146 (962); Cel147 (962); Cel148 (962); Cel149 (962); Cel150 (962); Cel151 (962); Cel152 (962); Cel162 (964); Cel163 (964); Cel173 (970); Cel201 (987); Cel227 (996); Cel232 (997). Other documents from 956 to 997: Cel211 (989) is a peasant payment made to Celanova for failing to repay a loan; two tenth-century charters of exchange with Celanova from the Rabal cycle are Cel178 (974) and Cel234 (997); Cel116 (956) is a document of sharing (‘ut incommuniarem uobis’) made between a priest and Rosendo. Note too that Cel125 (959) is a donation of land in Rabal but it is not made to Celanova or Rosendo. 4 Rabal sales from 1000 to 1031 are Cel244 (1000), Cel269 (1003), TdeC371 (1013) and TdeC387 (1015). See also TdeC372 (1011), a donation; and Cel262 (1002), an exchange. 5 These shared details include, for example, the preponderance of mixed farming and viticulture realised pretty much everywhere that we have documented peasant transaction in tenth-century Galicia. 6 M. I. Carzolio de Rossi, ‘La constitución y organización de un dominio monástico benedictino: Celanova (s. x–xi)’, CHE lxxiii (1991), 5–74, and ‘Cresconio, prepósito de Celanova: un personaje gallego al filo del siglo xi’, CHE lvii–lviii (1973), 225–79 at p. 225. The latter argues that the small peasant proprietor disappeared in this period; cf. J. M. Andrade Cernadas: ‘Celanova ‘es, en otras palabras, una gran institución señorial que va a funcionar como el primer agente de feudalización en su ámbito regional más inmediato, que tiene como primeras víctimas a los campesinos pequeños propietarios’: El monacato benedictino y la sociedad de la Galicia medieval (siglos X al XIII), Sada 1997, 77. 3

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comfortingly recognisable vision of the society of the Middle Ages. But when conceptualised in this way peasants all too easily become little more than the fodder of rapacious lords, their autonomy retrospectively diminished by a historiography attempting, ironically, to do quite the opposite. Yet to undertake to study the rural inhabitants of tenth- and early eleventh-century Spain solely in order to demonstrate their alleged subjection is to restrict the possibilities of debate ab initio.7 Such assumptions need to be put to the test by revisiting the documents and reimagining peasant society, for even if the charters in large measure reflect the interests of the compilers of Celanova’s archive, they bring to light numerous aspects of village life too long ignored. Rather than assume ever more intensive encroachment on peasant freedoms (as the historiography tends to), it is much more illuminating to examine how the ‘intermediate and very sizeable class of free property-owners’ of southern Galicia actually reacted to the presence of Celanova.8 By placing the rural community centre-stage, the changing social landscape, as well as the role that peasants played in creating it, is better understood. Giving, buying and selling Before the foundation of Celanova, southern Galician society was composed of a range of the free and the unfree, the rich, the less rich and the relatively poor: the question therefore emerges as to how the monastery and its links with the region’s leading magnate family affected the composition of this society after 936. This seems especially pertinent given the enormous wealth that the monastery enjoyed from its foundation. It is perfectly clear that the founding family considered the monastery a vehicle for the consolidation of its landed holdings across Galicia and its social prestige closer to home; various members of the royal family, all descendants of Alfonso iii, also showered gifts onto the monastery and concessions of authority onto its owners.9 Witness the remarkable gift made to the monastery by Ilduara, Rosendo’s mother, of a dozen estates or portions thereof; or that made by Rosendo’s aunt and uncle, Gutier Osórez and Ildoncia Menéndez, which saw the monastery receive the estates of Foramontanos, Couello and Pacini.10 To this substantial portfolio must be added Rosendo’s own huge donation to Celanova of more than two dozen villae.11 Ramiro ii, Rosendo’s cousin, also saw fit to make two major This is discussed at length in Portass, ‘Rethinking’. The phrase is Richard Fletcher’s in his St James’s catapult, 14. This book focuses on the twelfth century, at which time, according to Fletcher, there were still significant numbers of free peasant proprietors in Galicia. 9 Good secondary treatments include Pallares Méndez, Ilduara, ch. ii, and E. Sáez, ‘Los ascendientes de San Rosendo’, Hispania viii (1948), 3–76, 179–233. 10 Cel57 (938); Cel65 (941). 11 Cel72 (942). 7 8

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Figure 4.  The family of Rosendo.

Elvira Arias = Munio Gutiérrez

Rosendo

Patruina

Sabarico

Gatón = Egilo Vermudo

Ermesinda Gutiérrez = Pelayo González

Menendo González

Gonzalo Menéndez = Ilduara Peláez

Adosinda Gutiérrez = (1) Jimeno Diaz (2) Ramiro Menéndez

Gutier Menéndez Enderquina Menéndez Elvira Menéndez = = = Ilduara Eriz Gundesindo Eriz Ordoño II

Fruela Gutiérrez = Sarracina

Gutier Osórez = Ildoncia Menéndez Arias Menéndez Gudilona Menéndez = = Ermesinda Gundesíndiz Lucidio Vimárez

Argilo = Aloito Gutiérrez Osorio Gutiérrez Hermenegildo Gutiérrez = Ermesinda Gatónez

Gutier = Elvira

Rosendo, Celanova and the Village World, 936–1031

donations to Celanova within a decade of its foundation.12 Yet royal largesse is a thing apart, and is to some extent to be expected given the ties that bound Rosendo’s family to a series of kings in the first half of the tenth century. What of local society? Did the monastery’s enormous wealth lead to the creation of an estate management project that effectively disfranchised the inhabitants of the surrounding villages, forcing them to sell their land? Not initially. For some time, donation played as important a role as sale in the enlargement of Celanova’s holdings and clientele, although this was largely the work of richer members of society. Largely, but not exclusively, for the lure of protection from a family as grand as Rosendo’s convinced some ordinary folk that the alienation of assets was a worthwhile sacrifice to make: such acts of giving by non-elite members of society, common enough after Celanova’s foundation, were not visible in the Liébana in the years after Opila became abbot, indicating that the variable scale of aristocratic groups from one region to the next had ripple effects on the decisions made by owner-cultivators. The grandest of lords might not have been able ‘to control the detail of peasants’ lives’, but they were a more likely target for donation than were upwardlymobile dealers (like Bagaudano and Faquilona) who emerged from the confines of the village.13 The middling ranks of free owners were happy to seek advantage wherever they could find it. And although the grand donations made by Rosendo’s wider family are more striking than the smaller offerings made by other individuals, Andrade has shed light on patterns of donation to Celanova from its foundation to Rosendo’s death in 977, such that the reach of Celanova among non-elite strata of society can be glimpsed.14 For example, among middling peasant proprietors we see Mudila and his wife, otherwise unaccounted for in the cartulary, give a twelfth of their estate at Cuplarios to Celanova in 955.15 Ero and his wife Sindilo also have the appearance of small- to medium-scale owner-cultivators; this much is implied by the gift that they made to Rosendo in 937 of one-twelfth of their estate at Bembibre, a token aimed at winning admission to a sought-after client network no doubt.16 Sometimes the assistance of neighbours or friends was elicited by medium-scale proprietors jointly looking to cement their place in Rosendo’s clientele: Fromarigo and Siverto banded together in 941, with their respective wives (‘ut uxores nostras’), to donate various portions of their holdings to Rosendo.17 On occasion, it appears that Celanova offered a possible route out of a tight spot: the priest Vimara Cel69 (941); Cel77 (944). The phrase is Chris Wickham’s in Community and clientele in twelfth-century Tuscany: the origins of the rural commune in the Plain of Lucca, Oxford 1998, 205. 14 Thirty-five donations were made to Celanova in this period. See further Andrade Cernadas, El monacato benedictino, 73–80. 15 Cel112. 16 Cel55. 17 Cel66. 12

13

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gave his estate to the monastery with the express wish that its monks offer him protection and defence.18 In a similar fashion the peasant couple Gigulfo and Sisgundia had separate charters drafted to record their respective donations of a fifth and a half of properties that they owned in Bobadela, apparently for the remission of sins.19 But it is sale that really stands out in the Tumbo after 936, a fact that becomes more discernible in the third quarter of the century. This notwithstanding, Celanova was not long established when it began to buy from local smallholders, as charters from the 930s and 940s make clear.20 In these documents, and in those from after the mid-century, time and again we see the standard array of features: clauses of invocation and sanction, the dense description of family ties with some bearing on the transaction, and the location of assets within the social geography of the village; these elements together formed a potent legal admixture that framed almost all sales. These features were remarkably stable, the continuity in the form and layout one of the more striking attributes of the charters throughout the period. Thus, frequent references to land or property handed down from parents and grandparents, on occasion added to by its current owners, continue to characterise the documents throughout the tenth century and into the eleventh. Kendulfo’s sale in 956 of an ‘hereditatem que habemus de mater nostra Itilo et de auios nostros’, plus a portion of a vineyard and orchard that he had planted himself (‘ubi plantaui vineam et pumar’), can stand as a good example of long-established family ownership, expressed in keeping with standard conventions and formulae.21 That being said, sale to Celanova did not introduce title deeds to peasant society: the charter-writing habit was already firmly if unevenly embedded therein, but where once memory coordinated sale, Celanova’s presence likely made the written recording of transaction more necessary than ever. Hints of a growing awareness of the usefulness of ratifying deals in written form can be read into concrete examples. When Viliulfo and his family and friends made their sale to Celanova six months after its foundation, they referred in their charter to plots of land that neighbours had previously sold to the monastery, these earlier transactions never having found their way into the documentary record.22 Had charters recording these latter ever existed they would almost certainly have been folded into the monastery’s archive alongside Viliulfo’s document. Examples such as this point to an emerging pattern: social memory increasingly ceded ground to written title as relations between monastery 18 ‘ut abeamus de uos comoderationem et defensionem absque alios dominatores’: Cel63 (940). 19 Cel205 (989) and Cel206 (989), Sisgundia stating in the latter that the donation was offered ‘timendo peccato quod ambo fecimus’. 20 Cel54 (937); Cel68 (941); Cel71 (942); Cel78 (945). 21 Cel117. 22 ‘iacet inter uestras terras, que uobis uendiuit Aileuua’ and ‘iacet inter uestras terras, quas uobis uendiderunt Busianus, Zendon et Didago’: Cel54 (937).

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and villagers became more frequent and complicated. Celanova had certainly grasped this fact by 974, when it staked its claim to property that it was then about to alienate in an exchange, by explicitly referring to documents in its possession that demonstrated its earlier acquisition of the land in question.23 So too had some peasants come to terms with the utility of the charter by the mid-tenth century, some even before they dealt with Celanova.24 Some, in fact, seem to have consulted already extant charters when attempting to strike new deals, which speaks of the growing ubiquity of these documents in non-elite environments; this much, surely, can be read into the statement framing Vizemondo’s sale to Celanova in 955, the terms of which were conditioned by an existing document (‘secundum in alia uestra karta resonat’). Preconceptions are tested even further by Vizemondo’s additional statement that it was his wife who drew up the aforementioned initial document.25 Business remained dependent on accurate knowledge of the social coordinates of the village: the legitimisation of transactions by way of reference to the spatial arrangements of each settlement speaks of the need to protect property interests. Very little seems to have been held in common: on the contrary, private interest and landowning were what needed delineating and defending. It is in this context that the references made by owner-cultivators to the holdings of their neighbours can be explained. Here, a couple of examples can stand for dozens in the tenth and eleventh centuries: thus we see Tuniu and his wife Susana make a sale to another peasant couple of land ‘close to Cindu’s’ in 940, and Aloito and his wife Nunlo make a sale to Celanova in 1002, described with painstaking precision in relation to neighbours’ property.26 Identifying where other people owned mattered when attempting to bolster written claims to land, for all such claims were made within small worlds with their own story to tell; note that eminently practical descriptions such as ‘by Daniel’s house’ abound in the documents, and with good reason, for boundaries were zealously protected.27 Sometimes these references to neighbours’ holdings were to fields, vineyards and houses, but it was on occasion just as useful to use roads and churches to coordinate deals in the minds of their participants and the wider community.28

Cel178. This is also discussed in Barrett, ‘The written and the world’, 43–4. Cel99 (953) sees Pedro and Fredegundia make a charter of ‘sale and donation’ (‘donationis et uenditionis’) to Celanova of lands for which they already owned written title (‘de uilla nostra propria, an integro, que habuimus per scripturas’). 25 ‘in alia karta resonat quam uobis fecit mulier mea Bitilio’: Cel105 (954). 26 ‘et iacet ipsa terra iuxta laria de Cindu’: Cel61; ‘et meam rationem in illo agro de Manusindo, quomodo se leuat ad pumare de Mandino et figet se in uestra domo, et meam rationem in illa uinea qui fuit de Tauron’: Cel266. 27 ‘sub domum de Daniel’: Cel106 (954); ‘et iacet ipsa uinea iuxta domo Zegioi’: Cel147 (962). On boundaries, see the famous cases of dispute resolved by walking the limits of villages, examined in chapter 8 below. Examples are Cel62 (940), and Cel88 (950). 28 ‘circa carrale de uereda’: Cel170 (967); ‘uilla quod uocitant Pinario et Marturi … subtus eclesie Sanctum Christoforum’: Cel291 (1005). 23 24

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None of these descriptions would have been necessary, however, were it not for the deeply ingrained willingness to conduct business that informed peasant attitudes to landholding in this period. Much of this business, especially between peasants, must be lost to posterity for the simple reason that it was not written down, but that it went on is beyond doubt.29 Very occasionally, and normally because the land being transacted later formed part of Celanova’s portfolio of estates, a document survives which records peasants dealing among themselves.30 Luckily, however, these are not the only or indeed the most valuable indication of such activity. A tranche of some dozen or so documents dating to the period after Celanova’s foundation and before the first documented appearance of Rabal (that is, from 936 to 956) provides vital clues to the constant swirl of buying and selling that held this world together. Any of these dozen could be adduced in support of the point, but three examples from within the space of a year best demonstrate the regularity of buying and selling within the village world. The first of these took place in 952, when Vimara confessus made a donation to Celanova that included parcels of land that he had previously bought in the village of Karioca (Quiroga).31 In 953 Juan and his wife Sonita made a donation to Celanova, as did Aloito and his wife Bonella; in both cases it is clear that the holdings donated to Rosendo’s monastery had been acquired by means of purchase.32 Just two years later, another set of owner-cultivators took the plunge and gave to Celanova land that they had bought from the sons of a certain Geodilo.33 What is more, this practice extended beyond the immediate environs of the monastery, suggesting that it was embedded in peasant society.34 Buying clearly remained buoyant at the peasant level well after Celanova’s foundation too. In 988 the allodialists Miro and his wife Belaurida gave an estate to Abbot Manilan of Celanova, producing written title to prove that they had bought it from a neighbour.35 Medium landowners Alvito and Nunillo made a donation to Celanova of ‘our purchases’ in 1000.36 These examples are cumulatively compelling, and it is significant that the peasant Barrett is characteristically enlightened on this particular: ‘The written and the world’, 44. 30 Cel61 (940) is one example. 31 ‘uillam in Carioga … quam comparaui de homines kariocanos’: Cel98. In the same charter, there follows a list of appurtenances ‘quod simili modo comparaui’. 32 ‘et que nos comparauimus in ipsas uillas’: Cel101; ‘et de medietate de uineas quas comparauimus in Olimbria’: Cel102. 33 ‘quem abemus comparatum de filiis de Geodilo’: Cel112. 34 ‘meo pumar que aueo in uilla de Ruuiales que abeo conparadu de Leobello’: DCO3 (942); ‘tam de comparato quam de ganato’: Sob70 (941); ‘quos comparauimus de Ragisendo’: Sob87 (953). The first of these documents is an original parchment. 35 ‘quod ibidem comparauimus de Gaudio et de alios heredes, secundum in istas alias cartas resonant’: Cel202. 36 ‘de nostras comparatas’: Cel 243. 29

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proclivity for buying did not wane with the tenth century, a point brought home with particular force by a charter from 997.37 Furthermore, alongside these unambiguous accounts of sales recounted at one remove, there are other examples which demonstrate an awareness that land had been freely transferred from one set of owners to the next, be it by inheritance or commercial transaction.38 What, though, do these fractured remembrances of sale imply? First, that land circulated with regularity in deals not involving large corporate institutions like Celanova. Acquisition was prized by non-elite individuals, and the cut and thrust of buying and selling within the peasant world formed the backdrop to Celanova’s more famous campaign of acquisition. Second, the value of these examples resides in the fact that the information that they carry about prior sales is marginal to the central concerns of the documents in which they appear; in other words, such activity is taken for granted, its normality encoded in the minutiae of the more pressing matters of the moment. Taken together, these two considerations suggest that we have hitherto barely scratched the surface when we ponder the place of sale in the lives of the ordinary folk of the tenth century. Retaining, bargaining and consolidating The transacting habit was therefore very much a feature of this world well before Celanova’s emergence made it much more visible. And, as in the Liébana, peasants were able to retain a measure of control over their deals by acting in league with other peasants. Strategies of no little ingenuity enabled them to retain rights to their property, sometimes in testing circumstances. The strategy of sharing, known as incommuniatio in the documents and discussed in detail elsewhere, allowed peasants to bring others into the fold, perhaps extending loose ties of patronage in the process.39 Sharing was indeed in a sense a response to risk exposure; it was a calculated gamble aimed at preserving family interest in property, or rescuing a loved one from impoverishment, sometimes against the odds. One late example of incommuniatio dates to the year 1000 and shows Fernando and his wife share half an estate Cel233. In this example, the transfer of land between three sets of owners is traced in the document and on each occasion it was sale that saw it change hands: ‘et habuimus ipsa uilla de comparatella Onnemiru et uxor sua, et Onnemiru habuit ipsa uilla comparata de Ermegoto, mulier quod fuit de Monobredo’. Similarly, in Cel199 (986), Ermegildo reels off a list of his purchases, including ‘uilla quam inquiunt Arnogia … quomodo eam comparauimus de homines presores de ipsas uillas’, and ‘alia uilla Frazeno que fuit de Andrias’. Later examples are abundant too: ‘Et habemus ipso casare de comparatum de Venario’: TdeC324 (1011); ‘et habuimus illa de comparata’: TdeC339 (1028); ‘comparavi illo coram omni concilio pro meo precio legitimo’: TdeC341 (1016). 38 ‘et uestra uinea que fuit de Amabor’: Cel93 (951). 39 Davies, Acts of giving, ch. iii. 37

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inherited from their ancestors with Cresconio, a famously keen steward of Celanova’s property portfolio.40 This act of sharing served a very specific purpose, for it was prompted by a penalty imposed by a judicial inquiry – a penalty which invested Fernando and his wife with the obligation to assist their neighbour Gonterico, who was unable to meet an obligation to Celanova (‘pro iudicato quod vobis abui a dare de parte de Gonderico’). Acting as sureties for Gonterico, who likely faced ruin, Fernando and Nunillo had to share half their estate with Cresconio on his behalf: compromise was struck and disaster averted. Collaboration of this sort must have been commonplace, and the documents indicate exactly that: consider the case of Justino, who acted with his wife Onosinda on behalf of his sister María when completing a sale to Celanova, so that all might benefit from a newly struck deal at which María could not be present.41 To see peasants acting for absent family members demonstrates that their options were not always negligible when wealthier and more powerful institutions came calling.42 Such examples caution us to be wary of characterisations which cast peasants as the compliant stooges of aristocrats in tenth-century Galicia, for the evidence suggests that this interpretation is all too often overdrawn. Furthermore, on occasion the entrepreneurial instinct of owner-cultivators can be located unambiguously in the charters, obliging us to concede that the purchases made between Celanova and smallholders were not all one-way traffic. We saw this in the myriad incidental references to a culture of buying discussed above, but on occasion it is even more arrestingly present in the evidence. For example, Frogina’s decision to sell back to Celanova land that he had previously purchased from the monastery’s first abbot Franquila points to a willingness to play the land market; this, to all intents and purposes, was an investment, and the risk it implied must have been considerable.43 Seldom is it said, but Celanova also represented opportunity for smallholders willing to expand their estates by means of outright purchase. That Celanova was readily disposed to buy from and lend to small proprietors is beyond doubt, but the motivations for such activity command less consensus. How, for example, are we to understand the quite remarkable acquisition of peasant estates undertaken by the monk Cresconio in the late tenth and early eleventh century, recorded in more than a hundred transactions, and systematic enough to warrant its own registries?44 Cresconio was all things to all men: praepositus of Celanova and a celebrated member of its brethren, he was clearly a figure of some significance in purely spiritual terms. In addition, he Cel241. ‘Ego Iustono et uxori mee, ad vice de iermana nostra Maria, uobis patri nostri domni Rudesindi episcopi et fratribus monasterii Cellenoue’: Cel136 (961). 42 See also ‘Menegundia a mea persona et de mea sobrina nomine Godina’ and ‘Adaulfiz a persona de meos neptos duos’: Cel119 (957). 43 ‘Uendo uobis ibidem ratione que comparaui cum meos germanos de abbate domno Franquilanem’: Cel167 (965). 44 Carzolio de Rossi, ‘Cresconio’, 225; cf. Barrett, ‘The written and the world’, 151. 40 41

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coordinated sales on an enormous scale, cataloguing and confirming so many that separate inventories were necessary to lend order to the transactions that he oversaw.45 Were this not enough, Cresconio also fulfilled the less amenable role of bailiff-in-chief, taking peasants to court where necessary and enforcing the payment of compensation.46 A flavour of his activity can be gathered just by looking at the roles that he played in documents dated to the tenth century, well before he rose to the even greater prominence that he enjoyed after the year 1000. Thirteen charters testify to the pivotal role that Cresconio discharged in this earlier period; notable among them is his acceptance in 990 of a gift of land in Bobadela, a village with which Celanova would create dense links in the eleventh century.47 On this occasion, however, Cresconio’s talent for administrative affairs is made clear, as is his ability to wrangle due concessions from recalcitrant business partners: priest or no priest, Savarigo had borrowed an unspecified quantity of rent (presumably in kind) from Celanova’s praepositus, and he was made to hand over a plot of land in compensation, having been unable to repay Cresconio’s largesse.48 Evidently, Cresconio worked assiduously to expand the monastery’s landed holdings, buying outright from peasants, and also calling in loans that the monastery had made to smallholders. The emergence in the Tumbo shortly before the end of the tenth century of the loan known as the renovo has indeed been said to herald a turning point.49 But although hitherto simply characterised as one of myriad charges, rents and compensations imposed by the powerful, the renovo bears more nuanced interpretation.50 The earliest case in the Tumbo recounts the sorry tale of Adaulfo and Goto, who conceded the rights to a vineyard to Celanova in 989 for failing to make a repayment on a

Cel285 (1004) is a good example, but for a true sense of the scale of his acquisitions see his testament TdeC180 (1010). Some of these inventories seem to deal with specific villages, indicating that Celanova under Cresconio’s leadership adopted an increasingly professional approach to the management of its holdings; TdeC203 (1007) deals with properties in the village of Sabucedo, for example. 46 Cel298 (1005) shows Cresconio receive assurances from a certain Oduario that an earlier sale that he had made to the praepositus of Celanova would be respected. 47 Tenth-century deals coordinated by Cresconio are as follows. Sales: Cel208 (989); Cel209 (989); Cel216 (991); Cel226 (995); Cel227 (996); Cel230 (997); Cel237 (999). Donation: Cel210 (989) and Cel238 (999). This latter is a donation made to repay a loan. Compensations: Cel212 (990). Exchanges: Cel225 (995); Cel234 (997). A document of incommuniatio: Cel222 (995). 48 Cel212 (990). 49 See in particular, Carzolio de Rossi, ‘La constitución y organización’, passim; cf. Isla Frez, Sociedad gallega, 215; cf. L. García de Valdeavellano, ‘El renovo: notas y documentos sobre los préstamos usuarios en el reino astur-leonés (siglos x–xi)’, CHE lvii–lviii (1973), 408–48. 50 Carzolio de Rossi, ‘La constitución y organización’, 23. For her, the renovo, like the phenomenon of incommuniatio, is an example of what she collectively terms ‘donaciones y ventas forzadas y condicionadas’. 45

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loan.51 None the less, things were not as simple as they might seem from the bare facts of the case, for it is clear that the patience of the monastery had been pushed to the limit; endless rural credit without regulation it could not be expected to offer, and Adaulfo admits to paying the monastery years of unpaid renders (‘uino de renouo que non compleui per annos’). By the eleventh century, the monastery’s agents seem to have cottoned on to the fact that the calling-in of loans was a way to expand its portfolio of peasant properties. Yet the details of the specific cases that are encountered in the charters reward further examination. Raiolo and his wife Zenosenda could not make an expected repayment to Celanova in 1013, but their holdings belie the notion that they were hard pressed when they first took out the loan: houses, tools, lands, vineyards, orchards and rights of access to the mountains cannot have been within the gift of the poorest elements of this world, yet this large collection of assets formed their compensation payment.52 With that in mind, perhaps this was simply a couple that had overstretched itself, paying the penalty in no uncertain terms. A similar story is brought to mind in another example from the same year, and a famous case from 1030 shows that affluent middle-ranking peasants accustomed to investing in land sometimes played the market and lost.53 For what else could have befallen Gamiro and his wife in 1030? It beggars belief to imagine that they were driven by poverty to take on the renovo loan when we consider the scale of what they owned, at least some of which they had acquired through purchase (‘et de nostras comparatas’).54 Likewise, a couple in the village of Bobadela gave the monastery half their estate in order to compensate Celanova for an enormous loan worth ‘modios CLX’, surely not the sort of sum that peasants on the breadline would ever have entertained borrowing in the first place.55 Some peasants even made sales to Celanova in order to compensate the monastery for an unpaid renovo. That is to say that they were allowed to make sales to the monastery of some of their not inconsiderable possessions, even receiving small payments in return, in spite of having abused the terms of a renovo agreement: such flexibility makes it plain that the loan was a more tractile instrument than is often admitted.56 In a world in which all transaction entailed an element of risk for the inhabitants of the village no matter how wealthy the participants of a given deal, the renovo loan represented assistance for some and opportunity for others. Yet although a last lifeline for some, it was not necessarily so for all. The signs are, in fact, that the renovo was carefully policed, and there clearly existed a Cel211. TdeC473 (1013). 53 TdeC484 (1013); TdeC10 (1030). 54 TdeC10. For failing to pay back the loan this couple gave Celanova half of the following: ‘ipsas casas, torculare, terras, vineas, pumares, figares, saltos, devesas, arbores fructuosas, montes, fontes, pascuis’. 55 TdeC322 (1027). 56 TdeC574 (1027). 51

52

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sense of the need to adhere to correct procedure too. The year 999 witnessed a surprising spectacle when a local monk was admonished for abusing the renovo in a way which was deemed unacceptable by Celanova: in this document, the monk Gaudinas gave to the monastery ‘omne mea hereditate’, including property which he had purchased from others representing the renovo that they owed; he had taken on their debt obligation, but then frittered it away on ill-gotten gains, thereby failing to make repayment.57 Celanova protected its rights to collect profits – this much is beyond doubt; but this was not some sort of free-for-all, with the monastery imposing its will in arbitrary fashion. Rather, the renovo was an attempt to lend order and stability to the increasingly complex relationships between the monastery and the world of rural cultivators, many of whom relied on the material assistance and opportunity for expansion that Celanova provided: the complexity and richness of this society must not be dismissed simply because of the basic structural inequality that underpinned social relations. Light-touch patronage still bound the majority of people to their social betters even in the early eleventh century, and many villagers were not bound in exclusive fashion to a lord but retained considerable autonomy. In considering what underpinned light-touch patronage another possibility suggests itself: namely, that when peasants actively sought out the help of the powerful, they made the running. In fact, some examples of what can be termed a pro-active stance on the part of peasants can be offered. In 998 Meduma and his wife Lita chose to share with Manilan of Celanova a fifth of their property at Bande; in so doing, these peasants chose to enter the patronage network of a powerful neighbouring institution. In this case, Meduma and Lita sought Manilan’s protection (‘ut habeamus de vos moderationem et defensionem’) and obviously felt that aligning with the monastery was in their interests.58 Precisely what sort of authority the abbot of Celanova had over this peasant couple is unclear, but the basic outlines of the agreement can be uncovered: Meduma and Lita received their desired return of guidance and protection in exchange for their concession of a fifth of their harvest.59 In other words, a rent was established but freedom not necessarily impugned; quid pro quo agreements between people or institutions of unequal means were part and parcel of everyday life. Piety was also a powerful motivating factor for some. In 969 Viliulfo gave to Celanova the fifth part of several estates that he owned; he also gave himself over to the monastery, with the condition that the monastery defend and support his wife and family.60 These people owned on a scale large enough to suppose that they may have been medium landowners; all the same, they

Cel238. Understood here to mean protection and guidance or support. 59 ‘et demus ad area et ad lagare quinta integra de quantum nobis Dominus dederit’: Cel235. 60 Cel172. 57

58

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sought to move closer to God while also making arrangements in the material world.61 Thus, business was never too far away, but it was also dependent on matters beyond the control of humans, for peasants were to some extent at the mercy of the elements, a poor harvest sometimes prompting individuals to sell some or all of their assets to Celanova. This indeed is documented around the year 1000, when a series of bad harvests seems to have struck, but although sale must have been agreed with considerable reluctance in the aftermath of such calamity, we should not assume that this was always the case wherever we see peasant sale or monastic loan.62 The monastery must also have been something of a magnet to peasants, readily available to assist with the circulation of property and goods as and when peasants thought it necessary. In such circumstances it is not difficult to imagine that peasants willingly, and on occasion with great relief, turned to Celanova, an institution rich enough to offer material assistance. Whatever the case may be, the idea that all sale was ‘forced’ is unsustainable: peasants frequently sold land because they believed it to be in their strategic interest; after all, it seems that they were often able to negotiate what they must have considered good deals for themselves, receiving not inconsiderable payment in return for the sale of part of their land to Celanova.63 Thus, whether it was protection on earth or salvation in the heavenly realm, ordinary folk conducted business: moreover, they were not always on the defensive.64 Yet what these examples show when taken together is that the truly significant change of the tenth century in southern Galicia was that the village world no longer operated solely within its own confines: rather, it had a new partner in the vicinity with whom it could do business. To some extent, these options had always been open to medium landowners but the middle third of the tenth century shows peasants entering the orbit of monastic institutions in a meaningful way. It is thus not surprising that Celanova looked to

61 The ‘quinta integra’ of the villae of Froylanes, Sancta Marta, Azeveto, Trasmiri and Domenci are included in the deal, together with their ‘terras, uineas, pomiferis, saltis, perales, ficares uel omnes arbores fructuosas uel infructuosas, aquas cursiles uel incursiles, petras mobiles uel inmobiles, pratis, pascuis uel omnibus eductibus suis’. Davies has also commented on this situation in Acts of giving: ‘Celanova and San Millán collections – in very different regions – are notable for their high proportions of records that have no or minimal expressions of pieties, even though grants to the church are being recorded’; and on pro anima and variants she adds (p. 119) that ‘although many Celanova records lack pious expressions, it is the 980s before the formula becomes common’. 62 The priest Columba recognises the help that he received from Celanova ‘in tempore et dies de sterilitate fame’: Cel253 (1001). 63 In 961 Fatoy and his wife Animia sold to Rosendo and Celanova an eighth of an orchard and received in return ‘precio boue et uacca cum sua agnicula, preciatos in xx et iiii modios, et linteo in duos modios et duos quaterios’: Cel138. 64 For a very different view see Isla Frez: ‘Hemos visto que la historia del campesinado de esta época es la de su continua entrada en la dependencia de los poderosos’: Sociedad gallega, 234.

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formalise such arrangements by means of written contract, but although there is occasional reference to the rents imposed by the institution, these latter are surprisingly scarce in the charters.65 The inhabitants of Olalla came to an agreement with Rosendo in 959 by which they consented to pay an annual rent to Celanova of a quarter of the harvest from their vineyards, although they were discharged from paying the same rent on cereals and legumes.66 Similarly, a rent in products derived from the wine press and the threshing floor (‘ad area et ad lagare’), this time slightly more onerous, was settled in 992.67 One interesting example shows the annual tribute of linen imposed upon the inhabitants of the casal of Canedo, due every May.68 As is perhaps to be expected, those who worked properties owned by the king were likely to pay a tribute of some sort too: Ramiro iii and his aunt Elvira gave Rosendo, who happened to be her uncle, the ‘uilla quam dicunt Gallecos’, plus another village named Requeixo, where Celanova already owned salt-pans worked by homines.69 These men paid a censum to the king that would henceforth be paid to Celanova.70 Rent was therefore another fact of life for some members of this society, in which free tenants and free owners lived side by side. But the proliferation of inventories taken after 1000, later folded into the Tumbo, in which individuals are listed alongside what seem to be the renders that they owed Celanova, indicates that the monastery came to realise the need to manage these arrangements more dutifully.71 Who needed managing is another question altogether. Numbers and proportions escape us, but peasant cultivators clearly dominated this landscape: they were mostly private owners who were not tied to their estates and were free to engage in business, cultivating networks of friendship and patronage. None the less, alongside them there seems to have been a larger population of the servile in Galicia than there was in the Liébana, and lordship was certainly more developed in some Galician ambits than it seems to have been in the Cantabrian mountains.72 Some individuals of servile condition came from distant lands, such as the ‘mancipios et mancipias quod fuerunt ex gentes mahelitarum et agarini’ mentioned in a charter from 1029.73 Some servi were On rent see ibid. 234–41. Cel126. 67 Cel217. Note that Galician derivations of these terms are the nouns ‘lagar’ (identical in Castilian) and ‘eira’, both of which remain in common currency. 68 Cel239: undated. 69 Cel171 (968). 70 The reference to the payment: ‘ut ipsi homines persolvant censum quod regi usu soliti fuerunt’. 71 Cel272 (1004) is the best example of just such a list. 72 This cannot be developed in more detail but there are occasional references to ‘the lord’s lands’ in Galician documents: ‘iuxta laria de domno Iohane’: Cel61 (940); ‘uinea de domna Basilissa’: Cel193 (983). 73 TdeC457. 65 66

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workers tied to Celanova’s estates, while others undertook arduous menial tasks which seem to have been hereditary.74 The bakers (‘pistores’), swineherds (‘porqueros’) and female kitchen staff (‘mulieres de quoquina’) of Celanova, named in inventories which list their relatives, must imply that hereditary obligations were not unknown, some of which were most unpleasant.75 Similarly, kings and dukes seem to have set unfree workers on their estates, one inventory from 974 describing the division of these poor souls among Rodrigo Velázquez, Ramiro iii and Celanova.76 Many charters from the reign of Vermudo ii, a benighted king often pushed to desperate measures, show that he certainly had estates with tied dependents to alienate in gift.77 Whether such large landowners can be said to represent typical patterns is highly doubtful, however, and such examples are few and far between; moreover, servile labour is exclusively the preserve of the very richest in these examples: the king and Celanova. And as if to remind us of the apparent flexibility of meaning hiding beneath the terminology associated with servile condition, consider the deal set to writing in 1007 in which Vimara, ‘qui sum servitiale’, made a sale of many properties to Cresconio and Celanova. Not only a slave, nor merely a propertyowner, but someone prepared and able to engage in business of the sort that he saw going on all around him.78 Rabal Rabal today is a small parish in the comarca of Terra de Celanova, on the western fringe of the province of Orense.79 Situated in the basin of the Arnoya river, a major tributary of the Miño which runs west to east across the comarca, Rabal experiences a benevolent climate, with little annual rainfall and warm summers.80 The gently sloping hills and chalky soil, well-watered by the Arnoya, ensure that land throughout the parroquia is well suited to the cultivation of fruit crops and cereals, evidenced today by the abundance of chestnuts, apple trees and vines – staple items in charter transactions. First appearing in the 74 Cresconio’s men (‘hombres de Baroncelli quos tenuit ille prepositus domno Cresconio’), were listed in Cel245 (1000). 75 ‘facere balneos in quibus fratres Cellenove corpora abluissent’: Cel183 (977). 76 Cel177. 77 Cel204 (988); Cel218 (993). 78 TdeC201 (1007). 79 There are today six nuclei of population within the parroquia, perhaps best described as hamlets in English. These are A Abelleira, A Armada, Ponte Fechas, Rabal de Eirexa, Rabal de Arriba and San Paio. The parroquia as a whole has a population of about 100 people. According to Pallares Méndez, the village measured something in the region of nine kms2: Ilduara, 38–47. 80 I. Santa María Otero and N. Massó Lago, Atlas xeográfico e histórico de Galicia e do mundo, Pontevedra 2009.

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documents in 956, when two sales took place between the inhabitants of the village and Celanova, Rabal becomes a fixture of the documentary record in 961 and 962. In these two years alone, Celanova made at least twenty-one acquisitions in Rabal, all of them purchases from what appear to be peasant smallholders. In form and content the Rabal documents look much like those we see elsewhere in Galicia; that is to say that individuals or couples are seen making sales in land, carefully contextualised within the social geography of the village, for an agreed price. The preoccupation with family business affairs remains the charters’ most striking characteristic, and it is indeed only the number of sales made in the village over such a short period of time that makes the Rabal cycle stand out. Yet the quantity of documents is in itself revealing. First, it suggests that Celanova made a concerted play at the systematic acquisition of land in the village, making it clear that the monastery actively chose to engage in a policy of expansion in the 960s. Second, the number of documents adds to our understanding in incremental fashion, each charter adding a piece to the jigsaw, offering us a valuable window onto a microcosm of tenth-century village life. Such clues as exist suggest that the village was composed of individuals and families of diverse means: some estates were clearly bigger than others, and medium-owners and smaller cultivators rubbed shoulders. This is indicated by the quantity and range of the vineyards and orchards sold from one peasant to the next, as well as the amounts received in return from Celanova, which vary considerably. There may too have existed an appreciation of the variable quality of land, and this would have informed price. This consideration must remain provisional given the frustratingly impressionistic treatment of the documents, but it is likely that the village’s inhabitants and Celanova’s representatives took this factor into account and had some notion of receiving ‘value for money’. Proceeding with necessary caution, an indication of this awareness may come from a direct comparison of the price received by peasants in different deals which involve holdings of similar dimensions. In 964 Egilo and his niece sold to Rosendo and Celanova ‘terras nostras … et sunt ipsas terras seminatura quartarios vii’, receiving in price five modios; just two months later, Itila and his sons made an almost identical sale of ‘terras nostras … serente semente iii quartarios’, receiving only three modios in return.81 Prices expressed so opaquely obviate the possibility of serious statistical analysis, but given that the measurement of land is provided in relation to productive capacity (here ‘sowing’) and not size, and that this capacity differed from one case to another by a value of four ‘quartarios’, it is not otherwise clear why the difference in price was only two modii unless the quality of the land was taken into account – assuming, of course, that the modius was a standard unit of measurement. In any case, the range of prices paid to peasants suggests that they had some say

Cel162 and Cel163 respectively.

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in the negotiation.82 Price and value were important aspects of transaction, no matter how opaque their workings seem to us. The deal-making process bears analysis too, for it should not be assumed that Celanova’s agents always made the running. This they must have done on occasion, as it was they who visited Rabal, soliciting business from the inhabitants. And indeed certain days were clearly given over to ‘doing business in Rabal’: four sales in 961 were made on the same day, and three sales were completed on another busy day in the same year.83 Yet there is little reason to believe that these deals were always detrimental to the peasants who made them, especially in the case of middle-ranking villagers, who may well have taken advantage of the presence of Celanova’s agents in their midst to orchestrate deals. In 961 Fatoy and his wife Animia sold an eighth of an orchard to Rosendo for ‘precio boue et uacca cum sua agnicula, preciatos in xx et iiii modios, et linteo in duos modios et duos quartarios’, a substantial amount of valuable goods which left them with the lion’s share of their original holdings.84 If an eighth of their orchard was worth this much, then they were probably amongst the wealthier peasants of the village, and it is far from clear that coercion lay behind their decision to transact with Celanova. Sonimiro and Vindemiola made three separate sales in Rabal worth almost forty modios: clearly, opportunity was there for the taking for the ambitious owner-cultivator.85 On the other hand, Celanova’s enormous wealth made its position at the apex of the land market inviolable, its agents likely willing to do business when and where they could, this being the reason that we see the monastery sometimes receive what seem to be trifling amounts of landed assets. Getting a foothold in the village was what mattered, and in time the balance would tip decisively. For villagers, practicality and caution also entered their calculations. Accordingly, the size of plots varied, and division may well have been made into parcels which best facilitated deals; hence the description of peasants selling an eighth, a half, or a third of a plot. In the 960s, at the height of Celanova’s purchasing campaign in Rabal, some villagers were selling very small plots indeed, and here poverty suggests itself as a motive when taken together with the price that they received in return: for example, Rayane and Meroildi sold half a vineyard for clothing, grain and drink in 962; similarly, Foquina sold a single vineyard in the same year for scant return.86 Yet although hardship has

For the concept of price in these documents see Davies, ‘Sale, price and valuation’. Cel130, Cel131, Cel132, and Cel134, all made on 14 March 961; Cel135, Cel136, and Cel137, all made on 3 April 961. During the period in which Cresconio was active, this tendency became more pronounced; seven documents from the Tumbo are dated to 7 April 1001: Cel253 to Cel259 inclusive. 84 Cel138. 85 Cel146 (962); Cel151 (962); Cel152 (962). 86 Cel148; Cel147. 82 83

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been proposed as the sole motive for the sale of such small assets, it is not the only possible reading of these deals: after all, the sale of a small amount of land had significant symbolic resonance, opening up pathways to client networks.87 On occasion, peasants able to sell an eighth or a fifth of their property were just as probably calculating the amount that would ensure good relations with Celanova without leading to their own ruin. Patterns of change The sale of land by tenth-century peasants to ecclesiastical institutions such as Celanova did not necessarily mean the entry into tenancy, much less servility, of the selling party: dramatic changes in social relations are not betokened by the fact that Celanova came to own a large part of Rabal’s surface area. But such sales did entail change in one major respect at least: peasant allodialists, having sold part of their holdings, were left with less to give away, sell or farm for themselves. Economic autonomy was therefore the first to wither in the face of Celanova’s overwhelming wealth, but many peasants still looked after their own affairs happily enough. If social and legal autonomy was not crushed by Celanova, how do we explain the extensive programme of compra-venta that took place in Rabal? The evidence points to the fact that buying and selling at the peasant level formed a prominent part of village life before the intrusion of outside influence of a corporate sort embodied by the purchasing campaign of Celanova. References such as that made by Arias and his wife Ermegodo, who traced an eighth of their smallholding back to two previous owners, demonstrate that to buy from and sell to neighbours was commonplace.88 Villagers clearly dealt amongst themselves, and the land ‘market’ was thus not a creation of Celanova: the monastery merely raised the stakes. In addition, the apparent willingness with which peasants sold for profit to Celanova in the 950s and 960s indicates that there was no shortage of interested parties in the village when Celanova’s agents first became attracted to the fertile lands of this corner of the Arnoya valley. This need not be an indication of peasants living on the very edge of subsistence, desperate to preserve what they could and to sell in the face of increasing pressure. What the Rabal documents reveal is a world of owner-cultivators exchanging assets with a new corporate landowning entity on the fringes of the community. 87 On hardship as the explanation for the sale of fractions see Carzolio de Rossi, ‘Cresconio’, 257. 88 ‘et habemus ipsa hereditate comparata de Ermesinda, id est: de hereditate que fuit de Busiana’: Cel134 (961). That this was normal social practice in the region can be deduced from similar references to other villages: for example, Ygo, an inhabitant of the villa of San Pedro in Quiroga, made a sale to Celanova in 960 of land described as ‘quantum meus pater obtinuit comparada’.

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Both parties, in different ways, stood to gain, be it through the acquisition of land, patronage or protection. But how, if at all, did peasants stand to lose? Certainly, Celanova provoked ever more frequent, intense, active, varied and organised interaction between the different social groups of an already stratified society. But this was no revolution, feudal or otherwise. Neither was the great mass of the peasantry ‘enserfed’ in this period. Rather, the locus of change is to be found in matters more mundane, for it was the aggregate effect of the accumulation of hitherto peasant-owned land by Celanova that laid the groundwork for a complex of slow-burning changes that would not work themselves out until the end of the eleventh century. This began with the proliferation of sale made possible by Celanova: from the middle of the tenth century the peasant pool of private ownership was slowly depleted with every sale to the monastery. Even so, coercion seems to have played a negligible role in this process. The monastery did not have to force peasants into sale: in a society so accustomed to buying and selling, it was the institution’s wealth, in conjunction with the founding family’s prestige, which together convinced peasants that dealing with the monastery made sound good sense. By way of illustration, consider the analogous small-scale peasant sales (preserved on single-sheets) made to the Galician monastery of Carboeiro in the 940s, a reflection of peasant ingenuity, and a sure sign that locals tried to formalise nascent client relationships with a new and powerful neighbour.89 The picture here is scarcely one of dramatic change, but nor is it one of stasis: more subtle changes were afoot as a result of the dynamism of peasant society. After all, peasants freely choosing to sell to Celanova rather than being forced into sale would have resulted in the same economic consequence – one institution and its guardians became richer, and in so doing limited the extent of peasant wealth. Extra-economic coercion is not seen in the documents at this stage precisely because it was not necessary for elites to intimidate a peasantry accustomed to thinking strategically about buying and selling; yet over time such transaction – already central to the peasant mind-set – would come back to haunt the inhabitants of these small worlds. On the whole, the social autonomy of Galician peasants remained considerable, but it was this very autonomy that saw peasants ensnare themselves in the property networks of large institutions like Celanova. For so attuned was the average family of owner-cultivators to the business of transaction, so deeply woven into the fabric of everyday existence was compra-venta, that peasant families failed to see the long-term consequences of selling to Celanova, which were very different indeed to those attendant on sale to a neighbour. For as aristocratic landowning became less dispersed and more concentrated in specific areas, local domination became easier for institutions like Celanova. Strikingly, the political prestige of Rosendo’s family, reflected in the award of large-scale donations from the royal family and a crucial role in the public LC51 (948); LC52 (948).

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politics of the time, was of very little actual help when it came to subduing peasants. For this to happen, the family first needed a local base of operations from which to form more proximate, complicated and intense relations with village society – it needed the donations and sales that came the way of the monastery of Celanova.

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8

Magnates, Monasteries and the Public Framework The early Middle Ages was a period of great monastic expansion all over Iberia, but it was the patronage of a magnate family that set certain monasteries apart from smaller institutions. In Galicia, riches and political influence are most synonymous with the family that founded Celanova, as many of the charters of the Tumbo attest. Particularly revealing in this respect is a charter dating to the spring of 934, which describes how Rosendo and his siblings oversaw the division of the family inheritance, much of which would later enlarge the holdings of Celanova, founded just two years later.1 Even at this stage the family portfolio consisted of dozens of estates, stretching from the northernmost tip of Galicia to the Coimbra region of Portugal, creating a patrimony vast in size and geographical spread. Yet it was not just the scale of these holdings that Rosendo and his family were keen to emphasise: the charter’s commissioners were at pains to reveal that some of this property had been acquired in the ninth century, and that longstanding family interest underpinned its procurement.2 The tenth century would see this story of relentless patrimonial growth continue thanks to formalised and targeted campaigns of acquisition by Celanova, and while the parameters of wider society would change in response to the monastery’s increasingly assertive presence, the Tumbo also captures something of this society’s attempts to right wrongs for the common good. It is the governing structures that made these attempts possible. Governing, like business, was a family affair in early medieval Galicia. But while business was the calling of the world at large, governing was more properly the province of its richest families. Portela Silva and Pallares Méndez have whittled down the major families of the region to just four, all of them implicated in the government of the region to a greater or lesser degree, but there can be little doubt that the family recorded in the colmellum divisionis of 934 was the most powerful in ninth- and tenth-century Galicia.3 To understand something of how this came to be we must recognise that the sources of the Cel40. This sort of document is known as a colmellum divisionis, literally a ‘small column of division’, a document spelling out the distribution of family property. 2 ‘Denique placuit nobis ut faceremus inter nos colmellum divisionis de uillas ex successione auorum nostrorum Hermenegildi et Ermesinde, Eroni et Adosinde, uel etiam genitorum nostrorum Gutierris et Ilduare, quos comprauerunt uel donigum acceperunt atque de stirpe prendiderunt’. 3 E. Portela Silva and M. C. Pallares Méndez, ‘Elementos para el análisis de la aristocracia alto-medieval de Galicia: parentesco y patrimonio’, SHHM v (1987), 17–32 at p. 30. On Rosendo’s family, Isla Frez has written of their ‘extraordinario poderío económico y 1

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family’s power were not solely to be found in buying land and receiving it in gift: they were also located in an appetite for political manoeuvring abundantly evidenced in the surviving source material.4 In contrast to what happened in the Cantabrian mountains, there was in the north-western reaches of the peninsula a recognisably public political framework, a rudimentary system of government wherein kings looked to magnates in the periphery to support their endeavours in return for patronage and riches.5 So different in scale and reach is the public presence of the kingdom in Galicia when compared with the Liébana that its investigation poses new questions for the dynamics and development of both local society and royal authority, this latter classically thought to have ebbed away in somewhat pitiful fashion, leaving kings at the mercy of their agents as the millennium dawned. But the spectre of feudal transformation is indeed an apparition: after Ramiro ii’s death in 951, a series of kings faced imposing challenges from both within and without the kingdom, yet although confronted by Caliphal armies, Viking raiders and disgruntled rebels, the Kingdom of León did not break up completely.6 Rather, as the Caliphate crumbled, a rejuvenated kingdom slowly emerged in the north under Alfonso v (999–1028), culminating in that monument to political statecraft – a publicly-minded set of precepts, shaped by an awareness of the need to map such provisions onto local contours – the Fuero of León of 1017.7 Throughout this period, and in spite of such tensions, the public structures of southern Galicia never entirely yielded, and the essential qualities of those structures – process, precedent and legal prescription – remained intact.8 Rediscovering Rosendo Charters are by far the best source for a study of the workings of public politics in southern Galicia, but they are not the only wellspring of information, for Rosendo was the subject of a hagiographical account written by the twelfthcentury monk Ordoño of Celanova.9 This text, although replete with tales of Rosendo’s preternatural brilliance and exemplary behaviour, none the less helps político’, adding that the family ‘ocupaba el más alto nivel entre los magnates gallegos’: Sociedad gallega, 81; cf. Pallares Méndez, Ilduara, ch. ii. 4 Sáez, ‘Los ascendientes’, passim. 5 The best recent characterisation can be found in Isla Frez, ‘The aristocracy and the monarchy’, 251–60. 6 For all of which the best source remains Sampiro, and for specifically Galician problems: Vikings, 28, at pp. 340–1; rebels, 25, at pp. 332–3. 7 Among the best discussions of the text is J. Sánchez-Arcilla Bernal, ‘El derecho especial de los fueros del reino de León (1017–1229)’, in El reino de León, ii. 235–306. 8 Baliñas Pérez, Defensores e traditores, 37–45, 57–64. 9 This text is available, along with a critical study, in VR. Their analysis has led the authors to posit a date of around 1170 for the text: VR, 47–54.

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to flesh out some of the details of his life; it recounts, for example, that Rosendo was made bishop of Dumio at the age of eighteen (a position he is also seen to hold in the charters), before moving on to guide Celanova through a momentous period of patrimonial growth.10 These notable milestones and achievements point to the prestige that he enjoyed, but the material basis underpinning his exalted status is documented too. In a well-known colmellum divisionis, effectively a ‘list of division’ that catalogued the family’s holdings, the young bishop of Dumio was apportioned the following share of his ancestors’ landed wealth:11 Whence there was allotted into the portion of Bishop Rosendo: in the Porto district, Leza with Labra12; in Buvale13 Caneto de Auriense, Adisso and the pass of Reza and its pastures (saltos), that is, the pass and also the pastures beyond that part of the river up to the stream which flows from Castro Laureto and joins the river Miño, Mauregi with the orchards of Vizoi, and Viduas and Frasxeneto; in

10 Dumio was an unusual episcopal seat, as it was identified with the small town of Mondoñedo in the modern province of Lugo from the ninth century. Its origins are thought to derive from the Visigothic monastery of Dumio, close to the city of Braga, nominally directed by an abbot-bishop who undertook the range of tasks pertaining more usually to one or the other of these offices. It was probably Alfonso iii who transferred the ‘seat’ to Mondoñedo at some stage in the late ninth century, but it seems unlikely that Rosendo was based there for any serious length of time, given that his activity in and around Celanova was so extensive; Mondoñedo and Celanova are separated by a distance of approximately 180 kms, meaning that rapid transfer between the two was impractical. On bishops in northwestern Iberia, and on Rosendo and his episcopate, see Isla Frez, Sociedad gallega, 72–89, 80–4 respectively. References in the documents to Rosendo and Dumio are rare; the earliest dates to 927 (Cel29), in which Rosendo is named ‘Rudesindus Sancti Martini Dumiensis monasterii episcopus’, which is a slightly unusual formulation. None the less, should this be a twelfth-century interpolation, it at least suggests that a tradition linking Rosendo to Dumio existed by that time. 11 Cel40 (934). 12 ‘Leza’, according to the index compiled by the editors of CDC is a ‘felig. del antiguo concejo de Maia’, in Portugal, feligresía meaning a rural parish in modern Castilian, for which see CDC, 192. Also, note that there is a river Leça which runs through northern Portugal, which seems to firm up this identification. ‘Labra’ is also given as ‘felig. del antiguo concejo de Maia’ in CDC, 192. 13 The precise location of the territory known as Buvale (Búbal) is still a matter of debate. Díaz y Díaz describes Búbal as ‘extensa región que comprendía una parte pequeña al Sur de Lugo, desde Chantada, y parte de la provincia de Orense, desde San Esteban de Ribas de Sil hasta el Sur de la ciudad de Orense, abarcando las cuencas del Búbal, afluente del Miño, y del Arnoya. Dentro del valle de este último está Celanova, que en consecuencia aparece a menudo, como aquí, relacionada con el Búbal’: VR, 137 n. 56. Toponyms can be of some help in the location of places cited in the charters; in Cel40 two toponyms seem to be identifiable with locations in contemporary south-western Orense, which makes sense given that Cel40 describes them as close to ‘flumine Minei’ (the river Miño). These are ‘Castro Laureto’, today Castro de Louredo, situated in between the parroquias of Mugares and Alongos in the municipio of Toén, comarca of Orense, thirty kilometres north of Celanova. Similarly, ‘Reza’ is situated only 12 kilometres to the east of Toén, on the banks of the Miño, on the outskirts of the city (and thus municipio and comarca) of Orense.

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Caldelas, half of Pinaria14; in Monte Roso, the villa of Insula, and the fifth part of Bustos and Ulturaria and Sardinaria15; in the outlying areas (sub urbe Lucense) of the city of Lugo, Tamega16; in Toronio, Santa Eulalia with Sisnandi and half of Enisio17; in Saliense, Arra18; in Carnota, Tauiro and Curis and Ienigo with its hill (monte)19; likewise he has received in the suburbs (in suburbio Conimbrie) of Coimbra, Botton, and the fifth part of Quiagios, and a fifth of Peraria and a fifth of Avellanas20; similarly he has received a fifth of the villa Cipriani and of the villae of Pinione; and also in Anta, Villela, in Abbazes, in Oliuaria, and in Goianes and in the villae of Lampazas, a fifth21; in Baroncelli, a fifth of the villa that belonged to the king22; in Lemos, a fifth of the villa Mauri23; in the villae of Navia, Sabatelli and Angulo Malo, a fifth24; of the villa Sicca, in Berido, a

Literally, the place of the pine-trees (‘Pinaria’), in what is almost certainly Castro Caldelas, situated in the municipio of the same name, in the comarca of Terra de Caldelas, in the province of Orense, approximately seventy kilometres to the north-east of Celanova. On the derivation of ‘Pinaria’ see Álvarez Maurín, Diplomática asturleonesa, 251–2. 15 All small places or hamlets in modern-day Monterroso, a municipio of the comarca of Ulloa, in the province of Lugo. Monterroso is approximately ninety kilometres north of Celanova. 16 It is unclear whether Tamega is here a name for territory in the outlying suburbs of Lugo, or else, less likely, refers to the modern-day river named the Tamega. The confusion stems from the fact that Lugo sits on the river Miño, and the Tamega, a tributary of the river Duero, runs from Verín in the extreme south of the province of Orense, through into Portugal. 17 Almost certainly villae in Toronio. Ermelindo Portela Silva (personal communication) has arrived at a definition of the territorial limits of Toronio, claiming that it was ‘limitado por el mar y la ría de Vigo al oeste y al norte, el río Avia al este y el río Miño al sur’. This included most of the southern third of the modern province of Pontevedra; cf. M. Fernández Rodríguez, Turonium: aproximación al estudio de una tierra medieval, Santiago de Compostela 2004. 18 Arra, a villa in modern-day Salnés, a comarca on the west coast of Galicia between the rías of Arousa and Pontevedra, in the province of Pontevedra, given in CDC, 178. 19 Presumably all located in the modern day pueblo of Carnota, a municipio of the comarca of Muros, on the north-western coast of Galicia, in the province of La Coruña. 20 All places in the Coimbra region of Portugal; see Cel12 (916) for Peraria. 21 There is no further information about any of these, except for ‘Oliuaria’, which is in Céltigos, a parroquia of the municipio of Ortigueira, in the comarca of Ortegal, in the province of La Coruña. 22 It is known that Baroncelli was situated in the extreme south of the province of Orense, thanks to a reference in Cel34 (931), which gives details of a transaction in which a ‘villa qui iacet in Baroncelli, riuulo Tamega, villa que vocitant Berini’ is exchanged for another. 23 The area known today as the comarca of Terra de Lemos covered an extensive area whose principal nucleus since the medieval period has been Monforte de Lemos, some seventy kilometres north-east of Celanova, in the south of the province of Lugo. This area lay at the heart of the sphere of landed interest of Rosendo’s family. 24 Navia is probably located by, and named after, the river of the same name in the province of Lugo, which descends from modern Pedrafita do Cebreiro to the mouth of the ría Navia in contemporary Asturias. 14

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fifth25; in the land beyond (Terra de Fora) [the mountains], that is, the fifth part of Ordas, of Ripa Ruvea, Aleisonza, Sollantio, and in Octario those lands that belonged to lord Ero, and in Pesso near Zamora; in Asturias, likewise, a fifth part: that is, in Cordouario, in Canneto and in Quincto; and others which he owns in dependent tenure (in casamento), that is, in Búbalo, Varzena; by the banks of the river Minei; in Laurentiana, Sancto Adriano.

This much Rosendo owned in 934 – that is, before the main cycle of his property acquisition at Celanova got underway – and it is the geographical range of his wealth which is immediately most striking, for his family’s holdings spilled beyond the modern boundaries of Galicia into northern Portugal, the Bierzo, León, the Zamora region and Asturias.26 His homeland remained his chief concern, though, and the majority of transactions and donations from which Celanova benefitted took place within the confines of present-day Galicia, the monastery coming to cast an increasingly large shadow over the village world as the tenth century drew to a close. With Rosendo at the helm, property arrived at Celanova’s door from a truly diverse crosssection of society: royal gifts and concessions were frequent, but significant non-aristocratic gifts and more mundane business transactions also added to the steady accumulation of landed assets.27 Celanova’s story in the tenth century therefore seems to offer a paradigmatic example of the changing social dynamics brought about by a monastery’s insertion into a rural locale. But these changes were about people as much as place, and what made all this possible was the status of Rosendo’s family. At this juncture comparison becomes particularly enlightening: while, in the Liébana, Bagaudano and Faquilona strove to consolidate their wealth by operating outside of what we might call the conventional public structures of the kingdom, Rosendo’s family were as close to ‘servants of the crown’ as it was possible to be. The result is that in Galicia the dimensions of the public took on different contours once again, with ramifications for justice, magnate cooperation in kingdom-wide structures, and social relations more broadly.

I have been unable to trace these places. Berido refers to the modern Leonese comarca El Bierzo. 26 I. Muñiz López has shown that the family of Rosendo owned at least five major estates in Asturias, and has speculated that they may have been royal gifts, given their proximity to Oviedo: ‘San Rosendo y su familia: bases de poder de la aristocracia asturleonesa en la Asturias de los siglos ix y x’, TSP ii (2007), 221–64. 27 It is known from the colmellum divisionis that Rosendo’s family had been the objects of royal largesse before 934, since a portion of the assets inherited by Rosendo is described as ‘in Baroncelli uilla qui fuit de rege v parte’. 25

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Map 6.  Places named in the Colmellum divisionis of 934. (after Pallares Méndez, Idluara, 91)

Family matters Rosendo was born in the early tenth century, possibly in northern Portugal, an area in which his family possessed a great deal of land.28 His parents were Gutier Menéndez and Ilduara Eriz, both of them members of aristocratic Pallares Méndez, Ilduara, 12–17. On Rosendo’s birthplace: ‘ut coniux eius Ilduara remaneret apud Salam, nequaquam cessans a proposita oratione (erat autem Sala villa regia, ab ecclesia que super montem Cordubam in honore sancti Salvatoris fuerat consecrata,

28

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families of great renown. Gutier’s background was especially illustrious: his father was the famed magnate and royal confidante Hermenegildo Gutiérrez, and detailed prosopographical work has taken the story further still, showing that Hermenegildo’s parents (and thus Rosendo’s great-grandparents) were named Gutier and Elvira. Hermenegildo’s wife, Ermesinda Gatonez, was the daughter of individuals also known by name: Gatón and Egilo.29 While documentary evidence for these ninth-century persons is scant, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that to know them by name at all is indicative of the family’s status; their lives were indeed intertwined with those of the Asturian kings from at least the mid-ninth century.30 Quite how intertwined becomes clear by examining what is known of the careers of just two of these figures: Gatón and his son-in-law Hermenegildo, both highly influential people at the Asturian court in the second half of the ninth century.31 One tradition has it that Gatón was the brother of Nuña, queen to Ordoño i (850–66), but a thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century Arabic history, probably based on a tenth-century account, claims that he was the brother of the king, and this tradition finds more support in the early thirteenth century in the works of Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo (1209–47).32 Either way, some sort of family relationship can be established between Gatón and the Asturian monarchs of the mid-ninth century, and close blood ties may explain his leadership of Asturian armies in the middle of the ninth century.33 One lost charter of 878 from the cathedral distans fere per duo miliaria)’: VR, 118–21. This Sala has been identified as a settlement close to Santo Tirso, in the district of Porto, Portugal. 29 Sáez, ‘Los ascendientes’, 3–5. Also useful for understanding the complicated genealogy of Rosendo’s family are M. R. García Álvarez, ‘Gutier e Ilduara, padres de San Rosendo’, Boletín Auriense vii (1977), 119–53, and the same author’s ‘Jimeno Díaz y Adosinda Gutiérrez’, Bracara Augusta xxxii (1978), 143–80. 30 Flo69 (860) records a royal donation at which Gutier was a co-signatory. Flo112 (875) shows Gutier witness a document in which Alfonso iii donates and concedes the village of Avelicas to the priest Beato and to Cesario. 31 Sáez, ‘Los ascendientes’, 37. 32 For references see ibid. For the texts themselves, Ibn ‘Idhārī and Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada (these two probably both based on a text written in the mid-tenth century by Ahmed al-Razi), the following critical editions of these texts have been used: for al-Razi see Crónica del Moro Rasis: versión del Ajbār mulūk Al-Andalus, de Ahmed ibn Muhammad ibn Musa al-Razi, romanzada para el Rey don Dinís de Portugal hacia 1300 por Mahomed y Gil Pérez, ed. and trans. D. Catalán, Madrid 1975. For Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada see the excellent critical edition in J. Lozano Sánchez, Historia Arabum: introducción, edición crítica, notas e indices de José Lozano Sánchez, Seville 1974. For Ibn ‘Idhārī, the standard French translation had been consulted: Histoire de L’Afrique et de L’Espagne, intitulée, ‘Al-Bayno’l-Mogrib’, traduite et anotée par E. Fagnan, Algeria 1904. In this we are told (ii. 154) that ‘En moharrem 240 (juin 854), l’émir Mohammed en personne marcha contre Tolède; ce qu’apprenant, les habitants de cette ville députèrent à Ordoño [I], fils d’Alphonse et roi de Galice, pour demander son aide, et ce prince leur envoya son frère Gaton à la tête de nombreuses troupes chrétiennes’. 33 For details see Sáez, ‘Los ascendientes’, 37–48.

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archive of Astorga, transmitted by two eighteenth-century transcriptions, suggests that Gatón oversaw the conquest of Astorga, said to have taken place in the 850s, setting forth on his mission with supporters from the Bierzo, possibly his stronghold.34 More significant still, the same document identifies Gatón as a count and places him in Astorga, where he acted as a judge alongside Alfonso iii in a case concerning the villa of Brimeda. Close links between monarch and magnate continued with Gatón’s son-inlaw Hermenegildo, who has passed into the historical record as one of the great repobladores of the mid- and late ninth century. Throughout the late ninth century Hermenegildo attained great prestige and exercised royally-invested powers, rising to become maiordomus of the royal palace.35 A favourite of Alfonso iii, he married into the highest echelons of Galician society, wedding Ermesinda, the daughter of Gatón and probably the niece of the king.36 A series of telling appearances in the charters show that, throughout the 870s and 880s, Hermenegildo played a crucial role in the kingdom’s expansion and government. In 878 he is in Astorga, acting in the capacity of a judge alongside Gatón, his father-in-law.37 The same year also saw Hermenegildo undertake his most celebrated mission, the reconquest of Coimbra, recorded in the twelfthcentury Chronicon Laurbanense (or Chronicle of Lorvão).38 This source indicates that Coimbra was raided and garrisoned in much the same way that Porto had been by the mythic figure of Vimara Pérez in 868, yet whether the initiative for these endeavours lay with the frontier aristocracy or the monarchy remains a bone of contention.39 In Hermenegildo’s case, however, the evidence of his ‘tempore Domni Ordonii, quando populus de Bergido cum illorum comite Gaton exierunt pro Astorica populare’: Flo120 (878). The Alfonsine cycle of late ninth-century chronicles states that Astorga was reconquered in the reign of Ordoño i. The Rotensis redaction states that under this king, ‘Ciuitates ab antiquitus desertas, id est, Legionem, Astoricam, Tudem et Amagiam Patriciam muris circumdedit, portas in altitudinem posuit, populo partim ex suis, partim ex Spania aduenientibus impleuit’: Rot., 25. The Ad Sebastianum version tells a similar tale: ‘Ciuitates desertas ex quibus Adefonsus maior Caldeos eiecerat iste repopulauit, id est, Tudem, Astoricam, Legionem et Amagiam Patriciam’: Seb., 25. This would place its conquest in the period 850–66, but these chronicles do not name Gatón as a participant in this venture, a point which Sáez notes in ‘Los ascendientes’, 41. 35 Flo128 (883) shows Hermenegildo confirming donations made by Alfonso iii to Sisnando, bishop of Iria-Compostela (‘Ermegildus maiordomus conf.’). This was not Sisnando Menéndez, the mid tenth-century bishop of that see, but Bishop Sisnando i, on whom see HC, liber i, ii. 36 Sáez, ‘Los ascendientes’, 186–97. 37 Flo120. 38 ‘Era DCCCCXVI prendita est Conimbria ad Ermegildo comite’: PMH, Sc., 20. 39 Vimara Pérez, styled count of Porto in the Chronicle of Lorvão, is accredited with the reconquest of this city in 868, for which see PMH, Sc., 20. His descendants are discussed in J. Mattoso, A nobreza medieval portuguesa, a família e o poder, Lisbon 1981, 106–15. The Pelayo redaction of Sampiro’s chronicle identified Hermenegildo’s comital jurisdiction with Tuy and Porto (‘Ermegildus Tude et Portucale comes’): Sampiro, 9, at p. 291. On the question of initiative see Isla Frez, ‘The aristocracy and the monarchy’, 255–7. 34

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consistent loyalty to Alfonso iii, the responsibilities that it brought him, and the rewards that followed is unimpeachable. Witness the events of 886, when Alfonso iii and his wife received a sizeable donation of several villae, an act ratified by a charter in which Hermenegildo features among the co-signatories. Calculated public displays of the fidelity of his magnates were a key part of the king’s legitimating propaganda, but for all that those families that enjoyed the patronage of the king also stood to gain, as Hermenegildo clearly did.40 A much later Celanova charter of 1007, for instance, records how Hermenegildo received property confiscated from the rebel Duke Witiza as direct recompense for his service to the king.41 These relationships went from strength to strength after 900. Indeed the family’s continued role as the region’s preferred royal standard-bearers was assured by the marriage of Elvira Menéndez, Hermenegildo’s daughter, to Ordoño ii, who had succeeded to the throne in 910, ruling initially in Galicia before extending his rule to include Asturias and León. This marriage was to produce three further kings: Sancho Ordóñez, who ruled in Galicia (926–9); Alfonso iv (925–31), in León and – later – Galicia; and Ramiro ii (931–51), whose authority over the whole kingdom was in part secured by the support of Rosendo’s family.42 Yet foremost among Hermenegildo’s children was Gutier Menéndez, a trusted lieutenant of the princes of Alfonso iii, and in particular of Ordoño ii, in whose entourage Gutier was frequently found.43 Such was Gutier’s status by the 920s that high-ranking churchmen also turned to him for patronage and assistance: in 922, for example, Bishop Recaredo and a council of canons gave Gutier the task of overseeing the establishment of a monastery situated by the banks of the Miño, an act enshrined in a document confirmed by his brother-in-law Ordoño ii.44 A few years later the true extent of his influence is brought into sharper focus still: in 927, Sancho Ordóñez and Alfonso iv stipulated that ‘domnus Guttier comes’ chair an assembly of the kingdom’s leading magnates in Portomarín in Galicia, with the object of restoring a monastic community at Santa María de Loyo.45 These examples demonstrate that Gutier was a royal favourite, and nepotism indeed surely played its part in his pre-eminence, but favouritism was frequently harnessed to more formal structures too. As shown in part i, political power was in this period enshrined in rudimentary structures intended to create

Cel6. For the document see TdeC3 (1007). On rebellions see Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘Rebeliones en Galicia’, passim. 42 J. Rodríguez Fernández, Ramiro II, rey de León, Burgos 1998, 140–7. 43 SdeC29 (920); SdeC30 (917); SdeC32 (920). 44 ‘Hordonius serenissimus princeps confirmans’: Cel17. 45 ‘censitum est a nostro concilio ut ydem domnus Guttier sit tutor ab hoc monasterio’: Cel29. 40 41

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a framework for the government of outlying regions.46 These structures did not vary greatly in their essential characteristics from one region to the next; rather, difference was located in how well-rooted they were, itself a reflection of the strength of the personal relations upon which they depended. A great difference is discernible, for example, between the levels of cooperation between kings and regional powerbrokers in the Liébana and in the area controlled by Rosendo’s family, where power was visibly more organised. In the north-western corner of Iberia a string of individuals – Gutier included – were invested by kings with the authority to govern, which usually took the form of royal concessions of commissa (sometimes commissos), mandationes, or – rarely – comitatus.47 In practice these jurisdictions and their associated commands seem to have varied markedly.48 In Galicia, Isla Frez has shown how such circumscriptions were in many cases relatively restricted in scope, whilst in others indigenous populi or geographical features informed the shape and size of what are best considered discrete areas of political authority.49 How and why each of these circumscriptions took the shape and size it did is beyond us, but the equally unlikely notions that kings either imposed their authority at will and without difficulty, or else were led a merry dance by their magnates should be rejected: politics was not a zero-sum game in the tenth century but depended on the skilled manipulation and calibration of various interests by multiple parties. Accounting for the nature of the record is once again crucial when it comes to evaluating the dynamic that underpinned royal-magnate relations. For while kings legitimated the bestowal of power on magnates by issuing charters in which they presented themselves as the sole architects of such relationships, the very existence of such documents reflects monarchs’ awareness of the limits of royal power. Indeed, every time that they issued a charter granting commissa or mandationes, kings implicitly recognised that their power rested on co-opting magnate support. Consider the precarious position of Alfonso iv, whose brief reign saw him turn for assistance to Gutier, previously a stalwart ally of his brother Sancho Ordóñez.50 In 929 Alfonso conferred upon his uncle (‘Adefonso rex, tio nostro domno Guttierre’) the commissa of several places in Galicia in an arrangement that gave Gutier the express authority to govern (‘ordinamus uobis ad imperandum’): this was tantamount to an admission that rule in 46 ‘se emplea la terminología del condado o la mandación allí donde se configura un cierto poder sobre un área’: Isla Frez, Alta edad media, 146. 47 Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘Commissa, comitatus, mandationes’, and ‘Los “homines mandationis”: su declinación histórica’, in his Estudios sobre Galicia, 305–34; Isla Frez, Sociedad gallega, 140–51, and Alta edad media, 146–51. For a rare example of the granting of the comitatus to a major monastic institution see Sob107 (968). 48 On this particular, consider the comments of Rodríguez Fernández, Ramiro II, ch. ii, and Isla Frez, Sociedad gallega, 144–5. 49 Isla Frez, Alta edad media, 146, and Sociedad gallega, 130. 50 For Sancho Ordóñez’s generosity to Gutier see Cel26 (927).

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the region was an impossibility without the support of his relative.51 By 942, and with Sancho Ordóñez and Alfonso iv dead, Ramiro ii saw fit to reaffirm his links with Rosendo’s family, this time by conceding to his cousin Fruela Gutiérrez (Rosendo’s brother and thus Gutier’s son) the commissa once held by his father and uncle.52 Rosendo himself was the beneficiary of another grant of delegated government during the reign of Ordoño iii (951–6), who, as the son of Ramiro ii, was also the celebrated bishop of Dumio’s nephew. On this occasion the charter again states that the concession awarded to Rosendo had once been held by his father: clearly, family ties continued to be integral to the functioning of politics in the region.53 This much was certainly true until Rosendo’s death in 977, by which stage his family had for a century or more been the leading faction in the northwest.54 But what of the regularity with which a series of kings cultivated support within a single branch of the same family, from grandfather to father, and from father to son? The hereditary nature of titles and the holding of royal responsibilities from one generation to the next within the same family are frequently considered signs of the steady disintegration of royal authority, tokens of the fact that kings found themselves powerless in the face of magnate ambition. The example of Rosendo’s family proves that such an analysis is superficial. Quite simply, the dynamic that characterised this relationship was one of mutual advantage: it survived for more than a century precisely because of the benefits that it brought to monarch and magnate alike. Furthermore, the protagonists of our documents surely realised as much, for tenth-century persons of influence were quite as capable of realism as the historians who now routinely deny them it. Permanently stable rule was always something of a pipe dream for tenth-century kings – individuals excluded from power or disgruntled by the promotion of rivals were likely to take matters into their own hands, as indeed they did – but kings did not for that matter abandon all pretence at government, and neither was the attraction of royal power and prestige negligible for those prepared to play the game. Co-operation certainly brought material rewards. It is after all apparent that magnates holding delegated powers were to receive a share of taxation or tribute collected within the area under their command, even if the precise workings of such arrangements are only hinted at in the evidence.55 For some sense of what this implied, witness the material rewards accrued by Rosendo’s family from the following Cel32. Cel73. 53 ‘concedimus uobis ad imperandum et potius ad tuendum omnem mandationem genitoris uestri, diue memorie, Guttiherri Menendiz’: Cel110 (955). 54 Rosendo’s will was written very shortly before his death in 977 and is given in Cel185. 55 Isla Frez, Alta edad media, 151–66. Sánchez-Albornoz wrote about the taking of a tax known as the quadragesima, mooting the possibility of its being a north-western variant of the quaragesima Galliarum, a Gallic customs tax, or a one-off tax paid in March of every year: ‘El tributum quadragesimale’, 269–84. Isla Frez, however, has emphasised that although tribute 51

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examples alone: in 944, Ramiro ii gave Celanova fishing rights at Ograva in the Miño, following this up in 949 with a grant that awarded the monastery rural subdivisions of estates known as ‘deganeas’, along with all tax customarily paid to the king.56 Towards the end of his life Rosendo was honoured by royal largesse once again, receiving two settlements and their tied dependants, as well as tax taken there hitherto paid to the king.57 Much later in the tenth century Vermudo ii made a donation to Celanova which included a ‘mandationem in ripa Minei’, two more ‘deganeas’ and various ‘homines… ad seruiendum’.58 Even where tax was not involved, Celanova’s holdings were continually enlarged by royal gift throughout the tenth century. Ordoño iii and his halfbrother (and successor) Sancho i gave, respectively, a water mill and a mine to the monastery in separate donations in the 950s.59 Displays of magnanimity like these remained necessary in spite of the already long-standing relations in place between the royal house and the regional aristocracy: Sancho’s gift was nakedly political, for the king had been deposed in 958 by the appropriately named Ordoño the Bad (958–9), at least in part because of his failure to win the backing of the Galician magnates.60 Detrimental to Sancho’s cause was the fact that while his half-brother Ordoño iii had been close to the Galician aristocracy through his mother, Adosinda Gutiérrez, Sancho’s maternal family was Navarrese.61 In this light Sancho’s donation to Rosendo (singled out as the recipient) can be seen as a calculated effort to assuage dissidents in Galicia by publicly allying himself with the region’s leading magnate.62 Little matter, for another magnate had Sancho killed in northern Portugal in 960, a sure sign of

was probably paid throughout the tenth century and possibly before, the evidence available can only paint an impressionistic picture of how it functioned: Sociedad gallega, 159. 56 See Cel177 for the concession of fishing rights. For the award of tax to Celanova see Cel85: ‘Istas deganeas ab integro eas concedimus cum omne censo quod persoluere consuetas erant in usu uel debito regis’. Deganea, decania in Castilian, is a word for which no English translation is adequate, but Álvarez Maurín, Diplomática asturleonesa, 322–3, is useful; the term refers to a part of the estate, generally of a church or monastery, usually ceded to a third party for cultivation, so a kind of tenanted subdivision of a patrimony. 57 Cel171 (968). 58 Cel197 (985). 59 Cel90 (951); Cel123 (959). 60 Ceballos-Escalera is not the only historian to attribute Sancho’s woes to his unpopularity with Leonese and Galician magnates: Reyes de León, 108–10; cf. J. Rodríguez Fernández, ‘La monarquía leonesa: de García i a Vermudo iii (910–1037)’, in El reino de León en la alta edad media, III: La Monarquía Astur-Leonesa: de Pelayo a Alfonso VI (718–1109), León 1995, 308–20. 61 Ordoño iii’s mother was the daughter of Gutier Menéndez’s sister Ildoncia Menéndez; Sancho’s mother was Urraca Sánchez, daughter of Sancho i of Pamplona. For a detailed account see Ceballos-Escalera, Reyes de León, 82. 62 As can his decision to undertake royal business in Compostela, for which see SdeC49 (956).

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the political heft of the western aristocracy, and of the need for kings to move heaven and earth to secure the loyalty of major powerbrokers.63 Holding court Loyalty was only useful insofar as it was buttressed by competence, and men who revelled in royal patronage can often be shown to have had experience in running local affairs on the ground. This could take a variety of forms: Gutier Menéndez, for example, presided over a dispute between two groups of villagers in 940, helping to solve a disagreement over the whereabouts and extent of legitimate boundaries.64 In the charter Gutier is styled ‘count’ (‘peruenerunt in presentia domni Gutierris comitis’) and in this instance he was manifestly exercising public powers; he called the villagers together, heard their complaints, and assigned a team of trusted local notables to walk the bounds. It was these latter whose names bring the document to a close, truth having been witnessed (‘potuimus veritatem prospicere’), public justice thereby having been served. Similar examples from the Tumbo and elsewhere in Galicia show that the presence of individuals exercising comital authority was sometimes noted by the recorders of such activity.65 This is of course not surprising; on the contrary, it is exactly the sort of activity one might expect counts to undertake. Yet the public characteristics of this activity are not necessarily indicated by the presence of individuals holding comital title alone, for that appellation inconsistently accompanied the names of its (apparent) holders in the documentation: Gutier was called count in 940, but not when he had been awarded the commissa of several territories in 929, as public a duty as they come.66 A marker of public office perhaps but most certainly a marker of elevated status, the comital title may have been deployed by the writers of charters as a way of marking social and political prestige – a sign that such men were of the requisite stature to stand in judgement and to serve the community’s needs. After all, counts were as well placed as any in this society to mobilise resources and draw upon skilled legal practitioners, but when resolving disputes the preservation of the public good was what truly mattered, whether served by a count or not, as Davies has brought to light.67 The crucial point is therefore rather a simple one: the public sphere depended on formally structured displays of collective action in which procedure was paramount, and on a widely-held acceptance that the public arena was the legitimate ambit for Sampiro, 27, at pp. 338–9. Cel62. 65 ‘uenerunt ad comite Gundesaluo’: LC65 (before 962); ‘siue comes Rudericus Gutiherri et Osorius Gutiherriz’: Cel86 (950). Consider too Cel88 (950): ‘peruenerunt in presentia Suarius Guttiherriz et Roderico Guttiherriz qui eo tempore ipsum comitatum abebant’. 66 At least if the cartulary transcription is a faithful copy of the now-lost original. 67 Davies, ‘Judges and judging’, passim. 63

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the resolution of dispute. What we know about the use of the law also points in this direction, for the continued application of the Lex Visigothorum resounds in the charters, its strictures concerning boundary dispute evidently well known.68 This was clearly a society steeped in text and its provisions in all sorts of ways, a society committed to self-regulation via the legally-framed examination of word and deed. Be that as it may, boundary disputes seem to have been particularly common in Galicia, with examples deriving too from what is now northern Portugal.69 But why so? The explanation likely has to do with deeply entrenched attitudes; this was after all a profoundly proprietorial society in which marking out ownership had always mattered, and some villagers were clearly prepared to club together to protect what they considered to be theirs. But to what end did communities go to court over boundary disputes? As Roger Collins suggests, the prevention of the resurrection of the claim surely provides a context for the creation of such documents, but we must also go further, for it is important to recognise the lengths to which adjudicating parties went to reinforce public praxis.70 Consider, for example, that on occasion commissions were set up to report back on the original findings of the first stage of a boundary dispute, as well as to check on the correct implementation of the stipulations imposed. Such was the case in 951, when a group of important local men inspected the borders of Santa María de Verín, some sixty kilometres to the south-east of Celanova, the case having come to court for the first time the previous year.71 Vigilance and diligence were indispensable in such cases. Indeed, in order to ensure that nothing untoward came to pass, groups of men considered sound of judgement studied the facts. Such were sometimes simply called good men (‘boni homines’) in charters, at other times titled grandees and public officers (‘ducibus uel proceres palatii’).72 Judges are on occasion explicitly named too, implying that expert knowledge was available, and the search for consensus is normally signalled by an allusion to the presence of groups, councils, or a ‘turba non modica’, all of them gathered specifically for the purpose.73 In the early eleventh century, Alfonso v, accompanied by his guardian the major Galician aristocrat Menendo González, corralled another ‘turba non modica’ as well ‘De terminis et limitibus’: LV x. iii. i–v, at pp. 396–9. Further examples are provided by Cel86 (950), and Cel200 (987), which are dealt with at length in Collins, ‘Visigothic law and regional custom’, 89–90. Without being exhaustive other examples from the north-west include: PMH17 (911), and LC65 (before 962). 70 Collins, ‘Sicut lex’, 494. 71 Cel94; Cel88 (950). 72 Cel86 (950) features both. 73 For councils see Cel86 (950): ‘omni concilio multitudo plurima’. For the ‘turba non modica’ and the judges (‘in presentia iudicum’), see Cel200 (987). These councils were not collectivities of free men nor anything resembling a Galician constituency of the moot-hill, but were rather more formal bodies, approbatory in function, as Barrett has outlined in ‘The written and the world’, 102–6. 68 69

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as a team of judges when deciding to rule in favour of Celanova in a dispute over the possession of a smaller monastery.74 In these cases the appointment of ‘provisores veridicos’ whose job it was to perambulate the bounds and glimpse ‘the truth’ is a striking confirmation of the fact that custom and law were to some degree one and the same: it was customary to invoke the law, however ancient it may have been, and the law laid down unambiguous guidelines in this matter as in so many others; yet so internalised had these practices become, so rehearsed, that the line between law and custom was not a clear one. To the extent that public redress was sought and administered, though, this was indeed government, whether imposed from above or otherwise. Justice was also administered in Galicia in response to misdemeanours that might more readily be classified as ‘criminal’. For example, Gutier’s wife Ilduara, a considerable figure in her own right, presided over cases in which serious breaches of the peace were addressed in a court of law. Witness a charter from 940, in which Pelayo compensated Ilduara ‘in iudicatio’ for killing one of her retainers – the document was witnessed by a group of local persons and framed within the context of the correction of an abuse against public precepts.75 Similarly, in 947, Offino compensated Ilduara ‘coram testibus puplicatum’ for his failure to pay a debt.76 Sometimes, even where the document in question omits points of detail when describing what seem to be judicial cases, there is still a public aspect to the process by which a crime was resolved. In 952 Rosendo was compensated by an individual named Mondino who had been complicit in his daughter’s adulterous relationship with a monk named Vidramiro, presumably a coenobite at Celanova, hence the appearance of the case in the Tumbo.77 The land given by Mondino to Celanova in compensation had been carefully mapped out before witnesses, inscribed, so to speak, on the social memory of the community.78 There are signs that a sense of proportion reigned too: less serious matters such as minor theft were at least on occasion dealt with more informally, which seems to have been how events transpired in 961, when Rosendo received a compensation payment from Goton that took the form of a fifth of an orchard.79 Even here, though, there are indications that this was much more than the arbitrary imposition of seigneurial justice, for the document states that the original fine was given in terms more suited to a formal judicial hearing, hinting perhaps at an earlier record of events now lost; the 961 document is in fact not a court record per se, but a document drawn up in order to reach a compromise with Goton, the initial compensation fee of ‘modios viii et cuartarios ii’ seemingly beyond him. ‘Ordinauit ipse comes et iudices’: Cel260 (1001). Cel64. 76 Cel80. 77 Cel96 (952). 78 ‘delimitauimus et coram testibus adsignauimus et karacteres fitos’. 79 ‘uestras abelias quod spesi per furto’: Cel141. 74

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Justice could also go wrong, and indeed injustice could result, but this was a society prepared to correct such abuses. In 963 Senuldo recognised that he, ‘cum suos sagiones’ – that is, court-officers – had been a little too heavy-handed when attempting to extricate Beata and three of her men from her house, killing one of the men and destroying the house in the process.80 Striking a confessional tone (‘agnoui me in ueritate’), Senuldo got off relatively lightly, the court demanding that he pay a compensation fee of ‘vii solidares’, eventually met in vineyards and unfarmed land. Justice had here been served, and the suggestion is that it was formally delivered at court (‘et abui in iudicatu dare’). By the very tail-end of the century, justice was still being delivered in accordance with clear public guidelines, as an example from the reign of Vermudo ii shows. In 995 Osorius Iohanniz was awarded the villa of Alban, the case having been heard in the presence of the king (‘auditus in presentia regis’), who had assigned court officers to the case (‘mandauit ad sagiones suos’) and overseen the application of the law (‘sicut in canonem et lex gotica docuisset’).81 Another charter, this time recounting a quarrel over the ownership of a settlement called Villare, demonstrates that public process remained central to the resolution of such disputes into the eleventh century: the document in question runs through the whole gamut of procedures and officers, its very language suffused with the voice of public authority.82 Indispensable for public justice to work was not the presence of a count or a king, though, but simply of a figure of clear social prestige. Late in Cresconio’s days at Celanova, the famed praepositus received a compensation payment from an individual who had proved unable or unwilling to follow through on an agreed deal, but this was no stitch-up: judges were summoned (‘et per uestros iudicatores peruenitis inde in presentia iudicum’) and the help of judicial functionaries sought (‘domnum Sandino maiorino et per manum sagione Sagila’).83 From slightly further to the north, we see another example of the weight of personal prestige in ostensibly public procedures. Here, an aristocrat associated with Sobrado collected the profits from the court proceedings over which he presided, his status seemingly legitimation enough for his assumption of the presidency of the court. Yet indications in these charters suggest that this was still public activity in crucial respects, for ordered proceedings managed by skilled specialists clearly prevailed, even at courts held within monastic settings, at least on occasion.84 Taken together, these documents, by any measure, speak to us of a functioning public arena governed by a well-rehearsed array of Cel160. Cel223. 82 ‘Et ille rex mandauit suo sagione … et ordinauit ad ille comite Ruderico Ordoniz ut dedisset ueritatem… et ipsos iudices viderunt bene’: TdeC548 (1012). 83 TdeC194 (1008). 84 Structured process does not emerge as clearly in these examples, but signs of it remain. For examples see Sob21 (931); ‘et ordinaverunt nobis iudices’: Sob23 (949); ‘Perductus igitur fuit ante iudicum, hic ad Superatum per saione’: Sob31 (951). 80 81

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procedures, operative before and after the year 1000. Functioning with varying degrees of formality across the two case studies explored here, in both regions the public depended upon structure and process, as well as a sense of the visibility of such acts. In Galicia, these acts became the business of powerful aristocratic families of the sort largely absent from the contemporary Liébana. The balancing act, 966–1031 Visible authority was particularly important for kings. And the stages on which they chose to act, and the company that they kept, could stabilise royal authority and yet add fuel to already combustible aristocratic rivalries. To negotiate this balancing act was indeed no mean feat, for there were various complicating factors: for one, magnates looking to carve a place for themselves and their families in the command structures of the kingdom also had to channel and balance their ambitions among themselves.85 For the great Galician magnates of the tenth century, the shared if labyrinthine ancestry of the region’s leading families posed as many problems as it conferred benefits, a quandary readily illustrated. Take by way of example the family of Rosendo, the chief supporters of the royal line for at least the century or so running from Alfonso iii to Sancho i, during which period they also became the custodians of Celanova. In the middle decades of the tenth century, Rosendo vied with his second cousin, Sisnando Menéndez, bishop of Iria-Compostela and son of Hermenegildo of Sobrado, for the political support of a series of kings, Sisnando eventually falling foul of Sancho i due to the support that he lent Ordoño iv at the time of this latter’s coup.86 According to the chronicles known as the Iriense and the Compostellanum, Rosendo replaced his rival as bishop of Iria-Compostela until Sisnando’s pardon and release from prison in the early 960s, after which he retired to the family monastery at Celanova.87 Sisnando’s reputation underwent something of a rehabilitation thereafter, until he met an infamous end while attempting to fight off Viking invaders on the Galician coast in 968.88 But the rivalry was real enough while it lasted, and it presented kings with difficult decisions when it came to the bestowal of grants and patronage. 85 I. Martín Viso, ‘La monarquía asturleonesa en el Bierzo (siglos ix–x)’, in Mundos medievales: espacios, sociedades y poder: homenaje al profesor José Ángel García de Cortázar y Ruiz de Aguirre, Santander 2012, i. 733–46. 86 E. Portela Silva, ‘El rey y los obispos: poderes locales en el espacio galaico durante el período astur’, TSP ii (2009), 215–26. Further evidence of Sisnando’s alliance with Ordoño iv can be seen in the commissum granted by the king to the family monastery of Sobrado in 958, documented in Sob106. 87 For the basis of this rivalry see CI xi, at pp. 118–19; HC, liber i, ii. 88 Sampiro, 28, at pp. 339–40. For Sisnando’s death see CI xi, at pp. 118–19. For a summary of events see E. Portela Silva, ‘The making of Galicia in feudal Spain’, in D’Emilio Culture and society, 367–99 at pp. 372–3. Cf. the expression of this enmity in the charters, for there was without doubt much more at stake than fishing rights when Rosendo and

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Disputes among people of this rank underline the fact that there was a political aspect to the patrimonial growth of monasteries which could draw their leading patrons into open conflict. And for all the advantages made possible by cultivating dense networks of patronage, monasteries as rich as Celanova could also find themselves in the middle of protracted disputes in which both parties had some claim to the institution’s support. Such was the case in the late tenth century, when two grand magnates, both distantly related to the family of Rosendo, played out a particularly bitter feud which eventually led to pitched battle.89 Our sources indicate that it was the need to preserve family honour and to protect clients, presumably a desideratum on both sides, which saw the rivalry between Rodrigo Velázquez and Gonzalo Menéndez spiral out of control: whatever the case may be, this example serves to illustrate that kings faced aristocratic factions in Galicia of an entirely different scale to those they encountered in the Liébana.90 By the last third of the tenth century some of these individuals took the title dux, an innovation in the documentation from this period, and a sure sign of their power.91 Too much should not be made of this violence, though, particularly during the reign of Vermudo ii (982–99), who successfully deposed Ramiro iii largely thanks to the fact that, as Ordoño iii’s son, he enjoyed the backing of the Galician aristocracy, or at least sections thereof.92 Aristocratic violence was endemic in medieval Europe, and arguing over who should be king is not the same as arguing over whether there should be one, or whether he should have real authority. Magnate factions realised this, and the ideological resonance of León never escaped pretenders to the throne: Vermudo ii, for example, was crowned in Compostela, but he moved on León and made it his capital within two years.93 This is not to say that Vermudo, like his father before him, did not face serious threats, which are easy enough to find in the sources. Sampiro tells us, for example, that a large army was assembled during Ordoño iii’s reign in order to put down a rebellion in Galicia in 955.94 But, by the same token, rebels were only dealt with so effectively because kings retained the support of magnate factions willing to perform policing duties when necessary. The episode described by Sampiro is a case in point: a Celanova document Sisnando became embroiled in a lawsuit over certain piscarias in Posmarcos, described in SdeC42 (961). 89 Isla Frez offers a typically insightful summary of events: ‘The aristocracy and the monarchy’, 264–7. 90 The extent of the discord is revealed in a later charter: Cel191 (982). 91 ‘Ego Rudericus dux’: Cel176 (974). Rodrigo Velázquez’s widow Onega describes her late husband as ‘Ruderico Velasquiz ducis’ in Cel236 (999) and in the same document he is called ‘comite’. 92 On Ramiro iii and his difficult relations with the Galician magnates see CeballosEscalera, Reyes de León, 131. 93 For Vermudo ii’s coronation see Sampiro, 29, at pp. 342–3. 94 Ibid. 25, at pp. 332–3.

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recounts how Ordoño iii stripped Jimeno Díaz and his sons (the chief culprits of the revolt in 955) of their right to hold mandationes, before assigning these responsibilities to Rosendo, Jimeno’s brother-in-law.95 In 994 mandationes previously conferred upon the Galician aristocrat Suario Gondemariz were stripped from him: a charter tells us that he had become ‘puffed up with pride and led by a spirit of malice’ to rebel against Vermudo ii (‘superbia elatus et spiritu malicie ductus, reuelauit’); a similar story can be told of the same king’s actions against Osorio Díaz.96 Thus, although frequently troubled by revolt and the overwhelming power of the Caliphate under al-Mansur, the king was clearly no mere puppet of forces over which he held no control. Indeed he was able to move against rebels, at least on occasion. In 994 and 996 mandationes and other estates stripped from rebels were then transferred to Rosendo’s family monastery of Celanova by the king, who richly rewarded Celanova for its loyalty in the 980s and 990s.97 If anything broke the central role that Galician magnates played in supporting and, by turns, threatening royal power, in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, it was the assassination in 1008 of Menendo González, chief counsellor to the infant Alfonso v and son of the great Portuguese magnate Gonzalo Menéndez.98 But even by this stage royal power was still considerable and public structures remained robust. This much is demonstrated in a document in which the young king intervened in a quarrel caused by the usurpation by some local men of lands given as mandationes to Rosendo’s family, the great abbot and bishop long since having died.99 In this charter, the story is told of how some one hundred and twenty years earlier, Rosendo’s grandfather Hermenegildo had been given such rewards on account of his loyalty to the king. That they were so many years later reaffirmed by royal mandate as the possessions of Rosendo’s successors and their institution at Celanova neatly encapsulates the links between royal power and the functioning of public power in the region. This review of the public sphere in Galicia serves to draw out marked contrasts with its operation in the Liébana, which was of a different order, and more reliant on locally powerful people than it was on the king’s agents. Common to both regions, however, was a characteristic form of justice: based on procedure and text, this was not the seigneurial justice of the baron’s court, an image deeply embedded in the popular consciousness of the Middle Ages. Certainly, emphasis fell differently from case to case; on some occasions, the invocation of the law was enough; on others, court officers played the key role. None the less, the various manifestations of public order do not detract

Cel110 (955). Cel221; and for Osorio Díaz’s revolt, Cel229 (996). 97 Examples of Vermudo ii’s largesse are Cel197 (985); Cel204 (988); and Cel218 (993). 98 Annales Portugalenses veteres, ed. P. David, in Études historiques sur la Galice et le Portugal du VI au XIIe siècle, Paris–Lisbon 1947, 291–312 at p. 295. 99 The document is TdeC3 (1007). 95 96

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from its essentially public aspect. The robustness of such mechanisms perhaps explains why peasants largely continued to go about their business around the year 1000 as they had for generations before: there was no seigneurial intrusion in northern Spain in the period examined here, which continued to play host to dynamic peasant communities characterised by the prominence afforded to the family and property ownership. Moreover, insofar as we can see that tending one’s lands in accordance with need and – sometimes – ambition, mattered, we can also see that social mobility was a real possibility for the middling sort of village society.

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Conclusion The year 1000 has exercised such influence on historians of the society and politics of the western early Middle Ages that the ninth and tenth centuries have commonly been seen, at best, as little more than a period of transition after Carolingian decline; that is, as centuries destined to prepare the ground for the major changes that would arrive with the turn of the millennium.1 This book has sought to reconsider this vision of European development by returning to the study of rich and still underused sources – the charters pertaining to the great collections of the two regions here under study. Using these documents to build an alternative interpretation, this book argues that in the period and places examined here, northern Spain did not witness the fracture of public authority, nor the increasingly arbitrary and violent imposition of lordly power over peasants. This book in fact offers rather different conclusions, proposing that the workings of politics and the development of local society were subject to significant regional differences which only partially correspond with the prevailing paradigms attached to the study of the period. The eighth century saw the emergence of a new political power in Asturias. According to the later chronicles, both the Liébana and Galicia were constituent parts of the Asturian political framework before the year 800. Yet throughout this book we have seen that the documents that describe the growth of the kingdom paint an impressionistic picture of a more complex reality. Political power was a complicated and fraught phenomenon in early medieval Spain, dependent in large measure on the success or otherwise with which kings won and consolidated magnate support; at no stage in the period studied here, however, were kings merely the pawns of magnates. The tenth-century fragmentation of the state that occurred elsewhere in western Europe was not matched in Spain, where kings presided over a kingdom in which royal power, although varying in effectiveness from region to region, was never completely deserted by significant factional support; an upstart class of castle-dwelling hoodlums, so crucial to changes thought to have occurred in France, did not materialise. Rather, bishops and grand magnates held the Kingdom of León together against the odds: the conflict between Rosendo and Sisnando, reaching its apogee during the civil wars between Sancho i and Ordoño iv, shows that proximity to royal favour remained important

For a Spanish example see Mínguez Fernández, who argues that ‘debilitamiento de la monarquía, sometimiento del campesinado, fortalecimiento de la aristocracia’ were the bases of this ‘nueva organización económica, social y política cuya implantación se hace perceptible desde las primeras décadas del siglo x’: ‘Ruptura social’, 32. 1

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and actively contested.2 Aristocratic dispute over emblematic royal institutions like the church of Santiago de Compostela is indeed hard to explain if royal authority had ceased to be important. But kings could not simply expect obedience; they also needed to cultivate their support bases in what was already by 900 quite a large kingdom. This was no easy task, and they inevitably had to choose between factions from across the northern part of the peninsula. To complicate matters further, each faction looked to its own interests, which depended everywhere on local dominance, hence this book’s focus on the village world – for elite proximity to local society had far-reaching consequences. Spain has long provided challenges for its governors. Its geography resists easy communications between the dry tableland of the Meseta and the area to the north and north-west of the Cantabrian chain. These realities feed directly into the different trajectories of political and social development uncovered in this book. Southern Galicia, the focus of the second half of this book, must have been an attractive proposition to kings looking to cement their status: it offered a fairly large expanse of relatively fertile lowland, significant concentrations of aristocratic wealth, and was less threatened by attack from al-Andalus than the lands to the south of the Leonese mountains.3 Several kings consequently looked to consolidate support in this region, and Rosendo’s family benefitted from this relationship for at least one hundred years: clearly, the interests of the king and his regional magnates were not always mutually antagonistic in the ninth and tenth centuries. The creation of such strong ties was desirable for both parties: on the one hand, the royal voice reached the farthest reaches of the kingdom only thanks to the assistance of regional agents; and on the other hand, magnates developed a vested interest in the upkeep of political structures from which they were the direct beneficiaries. The Caliphate of Córdoba certainly tested the tensile strength of governing structures further north in the late tenth century, but it is quite remarkable that the Kingdom of León did not fragment totally, and the allure and power of Leonese kings must indeed have played some role in the kingdom’s upkeep. But the intensification of factional politics is only one aspect of change in early medieval Spain. This book has sought to ask comparative questions about the dynamics of proprietorial expansion across southern Galicia and the Liébana valley, as well as questions as to how, and in what ways, these dynamics were affected by the respective families at the forefront of programmes of property accumulation. In both regions ambitious families tied their colours to For comparison with Italy see C. Wickham, Early medieval Italy: central power and local society, 400–1000, London 1981, esp. ch. vii. For aristocratic competition between Rosendo and Sisnando see Portela Silva, ‘El rey y los obispos’, passim. 3 ‘Tras las campañas del Nahrón y de Anceo, del 824, ningún ejército saraceno entró en Galicia hasta que Almanzor llegó a Compostela en 997’: Sánchez-Albornoz, España, un enigma histórico, ii. 75. 2

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the mast of a monastic institution in order to further their wealth and social influence – but similarities between the families are otherwise superficial, more apparent than real. Let us, then, explain and attempt to characterise these differences. Southern Galicia, with its long-established rich groups of potentates, documentable from the middle of the ninth century, was home to pockets of aristocrats powerful enough to form the regional support base of ninth- and tenth-century kings. Celanova’s success throughout the tenth century depended upon the ability of its chief custodians to combine local lordship with involvement in royal politics from afar. This involvement took the form of royally delegated responsibilities for the upkeep of loyalty and security: this was, to all intents and purposes, and no matter how hamstrung by the technological and logistical realities of the age, delegated government. By contrast, elites in the Liébana arose from amidst a community largely composed of free landowning peasants – a village world which does not appear to have been framed in the same way by organised public structures. Here the public sphere existed but it was less structured, and the only politics that elite families knew before the mid-tenth century was local and matched the scale of their landowning interest, which was confined almost exclusively to the Liébana valley. The sort of wealth that it was necessary to accrue in order to establish kingdom-wide political power may not have been possible in the tenth-century Liébana. Looked at comparatively, it is clear that the effects of aristocratic political manoeuvring on local society differed in relation to the wealth, authority and riches of the elites engaged in such manoeuvring in each region. Questions of resources and prestige are also important: resources particularly so, because where these were limited, as they were in the Liébana, elites could not expand their holdings and increase their prestige such that they became a beacon for royal support. Consider then, the vast differences in resources and prestige between the two emblematic families from each region. To be sure, Bagaudano and Faquilona bought considerable landed assets from peasants in the early tenth century with which they consolidated their economic status amongst the richest inhabitants of the Liébana valley. But their efforts to secure their status seem to have stalled after the initial large wave of aristocratic gifts made to San Martín de Turieno came to an end in the middle of the tenth century. Opila’s abbacy at San Martín undoubtedly created significant momentum for a short while, but it may well have made peasant communities wary of the family’s presence in a way that they perhaps were not in the 920s. At any rate, the donations and sales dried up very quickly after 950, and the influence of the monastery, and of the leading local family associated with it, fell away precipitously in the last third of the tenth century. This is precisely the opposite development to that which we see in Galicia, where, by 930, Gutier and Ilduara were already the region’s most significant political operators and likely its wealthiest inhabitants. Peasants, however, do not seem to have flocked to them in great numbers in search of their 196

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patronage.4 In fact, only with the foundation of the monastery of Celanova in 936 would Rosendo’s family group have a stable base from which to make significant inroads into the holdings of the allodial everyman, as the Rabal cycle of documents shows. This was no flash in the pan. Celanova had grown so quickly, and so dramatically, that momentum remained with the monastery after Rosendo’s death: for example, Celanova made sixtynine purchases, many of them in the local village of Bobadela, between 1000 and 1025.5 What made this growth possible? This depends on where we look: in the Liébana, it was spurred by the roving ambition of Bagaudano and Faquilona, and in southern Galicia the magnetism of the aristocratic operators who founded Celanova. We also need to consider the role played by the rhythms of daily life, for it was the deeply ingrained propensity to buy and sell from neighbours, visible and yet encoded in the charters from both regions, that informed the peasant mentalité. The effect of this propensity was significant indeed, for it was the very normality of such activity, the way that it was woven into peasant existence, that made villagers so willing to do business with Bagaudano and Faquilona in the Liébana and Celanova in southern Galicia. This book therefore argues that scholars of early medieval socio-economic history need to give more consideration to whether village-level transactions can be read merely as an index of exploitation, because detailed study of these business deals hints at a much broader array of relationships, entanglements and associations among village dwellers. For peasants as well as aristocrats, transactions sometimes offered opportunity, and modest members of society were often prepared to engage in business deals, a reality which speaks of the flexibility of social bonds within the village. This consideration, in turn, offers new insights into peasant attitudes towards their social betters and neighbours; it also shines a light on the possibility of social mobility that such transactions offered to those ambitious and brave enough to buy and sell strategically. Indeed, in the Liébana and the Celanova region, peasant agency in manifold ways is striking for its dynamism and ingenuity. Yet similarity is framed by difference. The impetus which drove the rapid growth of Celanova was qualitatively quite different from that seen in the tenth-century Liébana, where a locally prominent family joined forces with an established monastery, but was unable to project its economic and political influence beyond the rather narrow confines of its mountain-valley locality. Power, the ability to control, cajole and command, was everywhere derived from the ownership of land, but in southern Galicia political eminence, royal favour and the holding of public office were directly responsible for shaping Admittedly, some peasant donations or sales to Gutier and Ilduara may have not been recorded, or have been lost, but this seems improbable since it was in the monastery’s interests to record these deals and keep the documents, as, indeed, they did when this process seems to have really taken off in about 950. 5 Andrade Cernadas, El monacato benedictino, 81. 4

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the scale of land ownership: this was not so in the Liébana, and as these factors varied from region to region, so too did the composition of regional societies, and the social relations which bound their constituent members, across early medieval Iberia. This book set out to integrate an analysis of the village world with wider social structures, and it has shown that these matters are inextricably linked; local social structures informed the shape and development of the public world, here understood primarily as a function of process, precedent and procedure. In the Liébana, where local elites ran courts, public activity was less structured and formal than it was in Galicia, where royal agents intervened on the king’s behalf, to the benefit of all parties, regardless of which of them instigated such arrangements. But, crucially, there was no crisis of the ‘public sphere’ in the centuries analysed here; the centre did not fragment as it did in some other parts of Europe, and its fault lines did not destabilise local societies, which simply made do and mended, creating new, improvised, but not for that matter less robust public spheres, every time a court was convened and standard procedure and the law were invoked. If it is accepted that local communities and their leaders attempted to order and regulate their societies in keeping with standard procedures and well-established practices, no matter how ephemeral the presence of the king’s agents, as was the case in the Liébana, then what is meant by ‘public politics’ needs to be considered, since clearly this latter did not require delegated directives, issued by the king, in order to function. At the same time, such directives could and indeed did help to articulate political and social structures in some parts of the kingdom, as was the case in Galicia, but even here it was the skilled calibration of various interest groups that characterised government, rather than any de haut en bas pronouncements of the sort so beloved of the Carolingians. In short, neat, binary divisions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ shed little light on the workings of politics in early medieval northern Spain, meaning that as analytical categories they are not a reliable barometer for measuring the ‘collapse of the centre’ or the ‘emergence of private interest’, a realisation that has significant implications for future comparative studies which might test this argument in other parts of the continent. Looking beyond the workings of public activity, more significant change can be detected in social and economic developments. Even so, this change resided in the concentration of economic power in the hands of aristocracies, and not the ever more intensive infringement of the legal rights of peasants. As this book has shown, this pattern is observable in both regions. Quite simply, the concentration of economic power did not a priori depend on the genesis of new mechanisms of coercion: these latter are indeed not a feature of the societies analysed here. However, peasant alienation of land, be it willing or unwilling, led to the concentration of landed wealth in fewer and fewer hands: accordingly, the common pool of peasant land was almost certainly smaller in both southern Galicia and the Liébana as the tenth century drew to a close than it had been in 900. This was not mirrored in the period before 1000 by the development of significant seigneurial rights, but was in itself critical, for as 198

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transactions began to increase, so too did the possibilities for elite domination everywhere, since the less peasants had to sell or donate, the more limited their scope of action would surely have become. This was a slow-burning, and probably imperceptible change, but it was not insignificant: still, the options open to peasants were curtailed well before their essential freedoms suffered likewise. To draw to a conclusion, a look at the ecclesiastical patrons of each region is in order. Rosendo and Opila, superficially, seem to be fairly similar figures: each was the favoured son of a major landowning family from a subregion of northern Iberia. Each became the leading patron of a local monastery and oversaw a significant period of patrimonial growth. But this is where the similarities end, and the reason for this was the scale of the regional elites to which they belonged. What being a close ally of the king did, in Rosendo’s case, was provide political structures which could cement his family’s already strong ties with the royal centre. What it could not do was to alter directly the ability to effect social change on a purely local level; here Rosendo and his family needed to engage with the local community, by means of a vehicle – the monastery of Celanova. In the Liébana, however, given the much smaller political sphere in which Opila’s family operated, it seems that even a monastery, that classic local pole of power for medieval social historians, may not have been enough to dominate the peasantry with quite the force that the secondary literature would often have us believe. The upshot is that northern Spain in the early eleventh century was indeed a society transformed, but it was the sum of the actions of peasant and prince, and of proprietor and priest alike, and not the top-down imposition of seigneurial dominion, that effected change. Spain, as the tourist board once proudly announced, ‘is different’, and indeed was so in the early Middle Ages; but if its history is given due consideration, then that difference illuminates areas all the more brightly within and beyond the Iberian Peninsula.

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THE VILLAGE WORLD OF EARLY MEDIEVAL NORTHERN SPAIN

In the early eighth century, the Muslim general Tariq ibn Ziyad led his forces across the Straits of Gibraltar and conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula. However, alongside the flourishing kingdom of al-Andalus, the small Christian realm of Asturias-León endured in the northern mountains. This book charts the social, economic and political development of Asturias-León from the Islamic conquest to 1031. Using a forensic comparative method, which examines the abundant charter material from two regions of northern Spain – the Liébana valley in Cantabria, and the Celanova region of southern Galicia – it sheds new light on village society, the workings of government, and the constant swirl of buying, selling and donating that marked the rhythms of daily life. It also maps the contact points between rulers and ruled, offering new insights on the motivations and actions of both peasant proprietors and aristocrats.

THE VILLAGE WORLD OF EARLY MEDIEVAL NORTHERN SPAIN LOCAL COMMUNITY AND THE LAND MARKET

ROBERT PORTASS is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University Front cover: ‘September’, from a series of murals depicting an agricultural calendar, Pantheon of the Kings of León, Basilica de San Isidoro de León. Photo: Fernando Ruiz Tomé. © Museo de San Isidoro de León.

ROYAL  HISTORICAL  SOCIETY

STUDIES IN HISTORY

Robert Portass

of Lincoln.

An imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620–2731 (US)

Robert Portass STUDIES IN HISTORY

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