WAYS OF LIFE

The peasants and the counts:

The count Ramón Berenger IV was interested in great conquests, that is why he needed credits and services. He also organised the territorial administration. He counted on the faithful aristocracy who lived in the castles and acted as liege lords who were in charge of the order and justice in their domains (counties). But the violent behaviour of these lords, together with the high taxes that imposed on the rural communities were the origin of the crisis of the primitive exemptions , putting an end to the last traditional freedoms of Catalonia.

These loyal liege lords considered that the benefits that could obtain from the rural communities that the count had put under their jurisdiction were the reward for their military services and the justice they exerted on the peasants. With the support of the mayors, who surely felt their interests threatened by the noblemen, the peasants of these villages made an official complaint accusing these liege lords of destroying the peace . The peasants' claim was the right to be administered, but not plundered. The count didn´t pay attention to their complaints. This way the king Alfonso I the Chaste promulgated a ban that protected the free landowners from ill-treatments but accepted as licit the ill-treatments exerted on the servants. In spite of some reform measures which were adopted by the monarchy and were favourable to the peasants, the social and political crisis was completely unfavorable to the peasants who changed the count's capricious and violent tyranny for some fixed and regular taxes that the peasants should pay to the lords.

Exemptions and servitude:

The purpose of the authority was almost always the one of stimulating the repopulation of the newly-conquered lands. A way to attract the settlers to the new lands was the currency.

The liege lords divided the peasanst in 5 categories:

• Small propietors.
• Free landowners subjected to censuses
• Peasants subjected to personal dependence and forced to pay censuses, to fulfil some services and to satisfy arbitray taxes.
• Peasants subjected to all these obligations and to the land.
• Peasanats like the previous ones and also subjected to ill-treatments.

There was a moment when the peasants began to emigrate to the villages , which wasn´t tolerated by the liege lords. This is the reason why they gave legal form to the servility process.

In the pre-feudal time the exemptions had had a more general character and they had been granted by the public authority with the objective of exempting to the beneficiaries of certain rents or public services. From the XIIth. century on the exemptions were granted by the count-kings and by noblemen and clergymen indistinctly, having as objective the exemption of loads and typical servility of the regime and they were dedicated to concrete communities. The reasons for which these exemptions were granted could be diverse, but actually, there was always a correlation of forces. The main addresses were the strongest and dynamic men in the manor houses had the help of the ecclesiastical authorities protectors of sanctuaries. Finally we can affirm that the concession of exemptions was the result of a fight of classes. The exemptions could create internal divisions among the peasant making advance the local solidarity in front of the class solidarity and contributing this way to create economic inequalities and functional differences within the rural community between men of the villages and peasants from the manor houses.