ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on peasant properties, large estates and the organization of labour, other sources of aristocratic income and changes in the systems. The indications are that the serf managed the farming of the ran, and returned most of the produce to the peasant owner. The aristocratic ‘estate’, was in practice a collection of small peasant farms – the ran in Marzan, with the serf who was super eam, was just one element of an aristocratic woman’s property. The tenants either behaved like free peasant proprietors, whether labouring them or using serf labour, or, in the case of those like Pricient, they behaved like minor aristocrats. The free peasant proprietor is a major actor in Spanish historiography of the twentieth century, although that historiography has been much questioned in the past generation because of its insistence on the colonization of depopulated land.
