3 - The emergence of a village elite

Summary

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.

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.