CLAIMS · CLAIMing land in early medieval localitieS: an interdisciplinary study of land claims and property regimes in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula (9th-11th)

CLAIMing land in early medieval localitieS: an interdisciplinary study of land claims and property regimes in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula (9th-11th)

What did it mean to own land in early medieval societies? For many regions in Europe, most of the information we have about this period comes from what specialists know as charters, that is, records of land transactions and disputes. In many areas, they can be counted by the hundred, even by the thousand. They are essentially an expression of the capacity that different actors had to dispose of land. But what was that capacity based on? At first sight, the corpus conveys the idea that actors of very different social standing played by the same rules. The charters present us all kinds of people, from peasants to kings and queens, from cathedrals and monasteries to lay aristocrats, realising their transactions following widely shared formulae. A closer look, however, reveals that different actors in different contexts conceptualised the appropriation of land differently, and that they resorted to different arguments to justify their capacity to dispose of it. These arguments did not appeal to a single legal framework. Rather, they originated from different frameworks of norms and values. Owning land, therefore, did not seem to mean the same for all people at all times. What can we say about the various manners in which early medieval people laid claims to land? Answering this question can contribute fundamental insights into the processes that shaped current European landscapes. It also provides us with an opportunity to reflect about how we want to engage with them at a time in which finding sustainable ways of managing these landscapes is a pressing endeavour. This is the ultimate concern behind the project "CLAIMS: Claiming land in early medieval localities: an interdisciplinary study of land claims and property regimes in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula (9th-11th)". The main objective of the project has been to build a theoretical and methodological framework for the study of land claims that can account for the different ways in which early medieval actors formulated, enacted, and engaged with each other’s land claims. A point of departure has been a long-standing tradition of historiographical research on the social meaning of land transactions and land disputes in early medieval societies. These were fundamental means through which social relations were negotiated, established, reproduced, and eventually transformed. Beyond that, the project has sought to develop a more profound understanding to how land claims were influeced by the different ways in which early medieval people related to space. The aim, however, was not to theorise in the abstract. Rather, CLAIMS has also developed a significant methodological effort, enquiring what the sources can actually tell us about those theoretical concerns. For this, the project has focused on one particular region, the NW of the Iberian Peninsula. Charters dating from before AD 1100 are particularyl abundant for this area. There are more than 7,500 records. Almost 1,000 of them are dispute records, of which around forty per cent concern land disputes, that is, cases in which two or more parties contended over land and other natural resources. The latter are particularly significant for rather than the more formulaic clauses with which land transactions are usually supported, they present us with the discourses that contending parties articulated to formulate their claims, how they engaged with each other's discourses, and ultimately what the outcome of the dispute was. Therefore, they allow us to see land claims in action, but also how disputes were settled and the settlements justified, that is, how the discourses legitimising the appropriation of land changed over time as a result of social interactions.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз