ABSTRACT
It is the local communities, protagonists of this book, that are the principal actors in the government of the territory. ey change face and form as wars, dominations, old and new regimes come and go, but remain basic to the political activity of governing the place. As a result of the way they had formed and developed during the tenth and eleventh centuries, the rural communities between the eenth and sixteenth centuries were ‘an area of jurisdiction, of meeting and decision-making, of the management of the resources of the territory and of the production of services, of the accountability to public authorities, and at the same time, a guarantee of the individual with regard to the latter’.1 e communities were institutions that grouped together individuals, generally on the basis of residence, representing them to the outside world and constituting the principal instrument of internal government. However, it is belittling to consider the community only as an institution; on the contrary, it was, above all, the way in which individuals cooperated (Granovetter 1973, 1373-6). As stated previously, by communities we mean networks that cooperated to provide domestic solidarity, especially in defense of their members, thereby producing institutions.2 We underlined that they were the means of perpetuating the social network and that they fostered internal cohesion, including forms of welfare, or, for example, by controlling the parish churches,3 of which they were juspatrone.4
