Community Meetings in Early Medieval Castile

Abstract

Local community meetings have long been considered an essential component in the institutional development of the medieval kingdom of León and Castile. Yet the early medieval phases of that development are often seen from a teleological perspective, as the formative phase of the more developed and better-known central and later medieval municipal assemblies. This chapter intends to explore the Castilian local community meetings of the period up to AD 1038 in themselves, as a fundamental aspect of the structuring of local sociability, regardless of subsequent evolutions. Building upon the evidence of the preserved charters from this period, the vocabulary, functions and location of such meetings are discussed, along with their scale: whether neighbouring communities engaged in assemblies at a supralocal scale and whether local meetings could acquire a supralocal dimension in certain circumstances.