Sant Joan de les Abadesses and the evidence

An obvious point from which to start exploring both grand and individual histories in late-Carolingian Catalonia, because of its detail and the established context in which it can be placed, is the cloister of Sant Joan de Ripoll, known since the eleventh century as Sant Joan de les Abadesses. Now a parish church, it is sited in the Ripoll valley, slightly further up the Ter than its sister foundation, Santa Maria. Unlike that house, Sant Joan has left a considerable part of its documentation. From a sixteenth-century inventory of the archive, which is preserved in the first volume of the house’s Llibre de Canalars, it is clear that what is now extant at Sant Joan or (mostly) in the Arxiu de la Corona de Aragó in Barcelona, is only about half of what was once there, although the losses are partially offset by the regesta in the inventory. None the less, the ninth- and tenth-century material for the convent and its environs is by most standards plentiful.

In fact, the house’s own valley and its southerly neighbour, Vallfogona, furnish just over one hundred and fifty charters from between 885 and the cut-off point of 1030. This sequence is concentrated more towards the early tenth century when the convent was most active in the land market. One of these documents, moreover, is an almost unparalleled demographic resource: it is a record of a hearing in which nearly five hundred separate people swore that the house’s valley, the Vall de Sant Joan, had been given by Count Guifré the Hairy to his daughter at the time of its settlement. That is unlikely to have been true, but the document lists not only the people’s names, the villages as a member of which each one swore and a flock of notable witnesses, but also the bounds of the convent’s alod and some idea of its rights therein. Its possibilities are huge.

The charters, both this one and the more regular transactions, preserved from Sant Joan illuminate with unusual clarity the impact of the young community on the society in which it was situated.