ABSTRACT
This chapter explains about words and about values, using the extant charter material from northern Iberia. Concerns about riches, rich people and the moral danger of wealth were part of the common currency of religious writing across northern Iberia. The ethic of reward is much more commonly expressed than that of the dangers of wealth. Wealth and its dangers were nevertheless a characteristic concern of some kinds of religious writer. The most consistent, and the most common, expressions of wealth lie in the statements of relatively high value attached to movables. Different standards were used contemporaneously for high- and low-value goods, as skins were valued in cattle, sheep in sackfuls and silver dishes in solidi in tenth-century southern Galicia. Value systems necessarily relate to exchange, and in most cultures they relate to commodity exchange, that is exchange as a system of purchase and sale, exchange in which the primary relationship is between the objects transacted rather than between the transactors.
