USURPATIVE DYNAMICS OF COMMUNAL USE IN CASTILLA (THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES)

Abstract

Private property development during feudalism happens within a network of interpretative problems addressed from multiple disciplinary approaches and theoretical traditions. This work enquires into certain factors of change and continuity related to property rights individualization and their com- plement in structural phenomena that affected village communities. It explores the usurpative dynamics in diverse territories of Castilla, the preferential uses of agro-cattle spaces by peasant elites and their implications for establishing inner differentiations that reshape the customary basis of those communi- ties. It identifies the profile of rights-of-use hierarchies in peasantry’s collective practices and its institutional effects in terms of individualizing ways of peasant uses. It questions contradictory pro- cesses in monarchic power achievement regarding the effective validity of socio-legal regulations which ruled organizational patterns in the rural world, examining the polarizing effects of privileged accesses to forests and communal herbages.