Litigios por la tierra y «malfetrías» entre la nobleza medieval castellano-leonesa

Abstract

The processes of land disputing, the most frequent form of aristocratic competition, are analysed in this article as a means to the understanding of important aspects of local political dynamics, this being understood as the set of actions aimed at negotiating and reproducing power relations at the local level. When we have identified the arenas in which such competition is inevitably located (even though not always in an explicit manner), and when we have identified some patterns of antagonism as structural (that is to say, in this instance, to dominant groups) then we are in a position to understand better, not only the different forms that mutual alliance and the solidarity between aristocrats take, but also the realtionships that can develop between different versions of political struggle. The changes in the use of appeals to law have to be understood in the framework of these processes, and not vice versa.