ABSTRACT
This chapter explains about personal sureties – individuals who played a part in agreements between two other parties and who thereby guaranteed contracts, payment of debts, good behaviour, and so on, for other people. It explores the operation of suretyship in early medieval Brittany; considers the incidence and character of suretyship in tenth-century northern Iberia; provides some observations about its relationship to issues of scale. The Iberian charter evidence of suretyship, like the Breton, is extremely important precisely because it provides evidence of personal suretyship in practice in all its varied forms and because it provides evidence of practice at an early stage, before the legal formulations of the eleventh century and later. The comparison with tenth-century Anglo-Saxon England, where similar things were happening, is particularly instructive: the record of royal legislation shows how kings deliberately used suretyship for state purposes, to underpin public order.
