Communities and sustainability in medieval and early modern Aragon, 1200-1600

Abstract

This paper examines the case of sheep raising in Aragon from the 13th to the 17th century to explore the political dynamics and social criteria that rural communities used to manage their common land, and their role in larger economic and political frameworks. In the line of recent historiography about the commons, the research connects the strength of rural communities, institutional arrangements governing access to natural resources, and environmental efficiency. The hypothesis is that the "social reproduction" of the community was the aim that defined the collective action of strong and horizontal communities. They preserved their natural resources and defended large swathes of common land from foreigners. However, when these communities acted in a more complex system of transhumance within the framework of poorly articulated kingdoms, they would tend to predate others' resources and keep others' commons open to their free access. The outcome was the existence of large, but very different, and contested, kinds of commons.

Community Land in Portugal: New Dynamics of Institutional Articulation for Territorial Development

“…The history of the commons goes back centuries and reveals the great social, economic and environmental organization of the rural population in medieval times, according to research on the region of Aragon, Spain (Echegaray, 2011), which indicates the existence of an institutional arrangement that guaranteed the reproduction and political participation of the "vecinos", the community residents, who defined the level and permission of access to common lands and about the grazing times. According to the author, "the village controlled the pressure on natural resources".…”

Did the Commons Make Medieval and Early Modern Rural Societies More Equitable? A Survey of Evidence from acrossWesternEurope, 1300–1800

“…Essentially, what is now being suggested is this: no form of property right is inherently or intrinsically ‘better’ than any other, and the effectiveness of property rights and the land market in general was (and is) determined by being embedded within particular social contexts (Congost , 90). In that way, the commons were not mired in antiquated feudal relations but could coexist as active components of commercializing rural economies (Curtis ) – just to use one example, in the Ebro River plains and Pyrenees of northern Spain, common pastures were formally consolidated in the thirteenth century, at the very time that local and international wool markets began to expand (Pascua Echegaray ).…”