ABSTRACT
There has been a good deal of discussion of conflict resolution and dispute settlement in early medieval Europe during the past generation, although national historiographies have much longer traditions of studying the history of law and its application and there is an even longer-established trans-national study of Roman law, a field which remains extremely lively. 1 Recent discussion has been occupied with social conflict in many kinds of arena, but sometimes, as in this book, it has focused on the handling of disputes within a judicial process, often strongly influenced by the legal anthropology of a generation ago, with its focus on law residing ‘in the minds and practices of people in a society’. 2 Some of the most influential analyses of process have focused on the eleventh century; 3 and while there have been excellent regional studies, there has also been some tendency to generalize about western Europe as a whole. 4 When this happens, it has the effect of making everywhere appear the same. There clearly was plenty of common practice shared across wide areas of western Europe before 1000, but there were some significant differences too. It is the purpose of this chapter to make some observations on northern Iberia in the western European context – what practice was shared and what diverged, and how far does northern Iberia fit the paradigms of the dominant historical interpretations?
