ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with all the major charter collections in the kingdom of Asturias-Leon up to the year 1000: all of them, because comparison between collections is very instructive. It focuses on charters which describe transactions by using ‘exchange’ words such as commutare and concambiare and deals with an overview of the principal types of exchange recorded by charter. Exchange charters are in fact a hybrid form. Modern editors have sometimes noted or counted exchange charters in their introductions to editions, and there is some comment by legal historians, but there is no large historiography on Iberian exchange. The format of exchange charters is very similar across the whole region, from Galicia to Castile. Numbers, and proportions, of exchange charters are tiny by comparison with those from some of the Italian and German collections, although the proportion of exchange between purely lay parties in northern Iberia is surprisingly high.
