ABSTRACT
The local council's strategy and its, at least momentary, effectiveness reveals the short-circuiting that central power was subject to in practice. In order to ensure that the new situation reached by the council and the monastery could never be broken, the king reversed a legal provision, that which forbade assets belonging to the realengo from becoming part of the abadengo and vice versa. King Ferdinand III confirmed the settlement which don Lope Diaz de Haro, a Castilian baron who at the time held office as Adelantado, had undertaken by way of an inquiry. However, in 1283, the case is reopened due to a claim made by the abbot of Ona, alleging that the people of Frias had nullified the previous resolution by obtaining an illegal charter from king Sancho. The predominance of resolutions agreed upon by the litigants, of compromises in the royal courts, sometimes reached through apparently strict adjudication methods.
