| This dissertation examines the economic, social and political life of La Plana, an area associated with an extensive irrigation system at the mouth of the Millars river in eastern Spain, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. This was part of a new kingdom established by the Christian monarchs of Aragon in the wake of their conquest and seizure of it from its previous Muslim rulers. Historians have debated to what extent this was a feudal society on the northern European model and how its legal framework shaped, and was shaped by, economic factors, particularly urban-based commerce. La Plana is a fruitful area for such study owing to the rich documentary record left by municipal councils of its main towns. This dissertation, therefore, is the product of a trawl of those documents searching for evidence of economic activity, class conflict, legal structure, friction between different political forces and civic life in provincial towns.;I argue that the main town of La Plana, Castelló, though owing fealty to an often distant king, was in no way a feudal entity. It saw itself as essentially autonomous and defended its traditional rights and privileges against other towns, nearby feudal lords, ecclesiastical establishments, the ravenous metropolis of Valencia city and the monarchy. Also, the bourgeois and mercantile character of the towns of the new kingdom and the great autonomy granted to them in their charters of foundation and the many privileges bestowed upon them by subsequent monarchs led them to become independent nodes of power and fostered the creation of a socio-economic class whose interests were inimical to those of the nobility and, in the end, to those of the monarchy itself. Castelló was also the arena of struggles between rival social classes and economic interests within the town itself. I also look at efforts by the town authorities to regulate trade, maintain infrastructure, keep public order and promote public health. |
