ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the incidence of the term boni homines in pre-eleventh-century Iberian charters, excluding Catalonia, explores comparabilities elsewhere in Europe, considers the issues raised and end with some questions to pursue. The corpus of surviving Iberian charters is rather late by European standards, there being about twenty from the eighth century, 200 from the ninth and 2,500 from the tenth. Boni homines was a term widely used in Europe in the early and central middle ages to refer to trusted people who were called to witness contracts, commitments and transactions or from whom judges were chosen, in other words, respected people of good reputation. Georges Duby’s indication of the fact that by the year 1000 references to boni homines in judicial courts had tended to peter out in the Frankish world has had a powerful influence on the historiography of public power in medieval Europe.
