Reclamar y construir los paisajes comunales: Los devasos de Ciudad Rodrigo en la Edad Media

Abstract

This paper focuses on the analysis of the ways which areas of collective use were created and claimed in the Middle Ages, through the case of the devasos of Ciudad Rodrigo. They were lands used preferentially to the grazing of cattle and to the collection of firewood; the inhabitants of the town of Ciudad Rodrigo as well as the neighbours of the villages that surrounded those areas had rights of entitlement to access. The means of claiming communal rights over those spaces between eleventh and fifteenth centuries have been studied thanks to a combination of archaeological record and written sources. The main hypothesis is the use of a claiming strategy based on sacralisation. First, burials linked the territory to the ancestors during early Middle Ages, and after the construction of buildings with religious functions, small churches that were not parishes, would have been a key to preserve the commons. Those politics of the sacred coexisted with the progressive identification of the devasos as properties of the council as a result of the affirmation of the power of the town of Ciudad Rodrigo.