The Vicars Guifré and Ansulf are men who could be considered by some as holding a public authority, delegated from the count through the patronage that gave them their beneficia or castles. The etymology of their titles implies such delegation: the vicarii, local substitutes for the count, and further up, viscounts, deputies for the count. Even the counts derived their title from a notional companionship with the distant king. These are ideas of power external to the March, imported with the Franks, if not, as in cases like the offices of saio or of judge, with the Visigoths. They are structures that the historian of other areas coming to Catalonia will recognise; and so did the kings, for they appeared in royal documents. They provide a template of administration for the area. All the same what did they mean in this local environment, from which the king was absent?

After the appointment in 878 of Guifré the Hairy and his brother Miró to the few counties on the March that they did not already share, the king’s practical ability to affect the comital succession ended, but respect for him did not. He remained a recourse to end deadlocks between the counts. These arose particularly over elections to the bishopric of Girona, perhaps because unlike other sees it was not clear there which comital family had control.

The kings also continued to issue immunities to Catalan churches, some of which appear to have been based on real rights and possessions and therefore possessed of a practical value that only the respect of the counts could have given them. Late on, the power of the counts is still being expressed in terms of delegation from the king: Borrell II twice claimed the disposal of lands ‘through the voice of my parents or by the fiscal voice that my parents obtained, just as do I obtain it, by a precept of donation of royal power’. This phrase occurs word-for-word in two charters in the archive of the cathedral of Barcelona, by different scribes, which suggests that it was a formula of Borrell’s own rather than a scribal flourish; there was a very similar formulation in the sale of Sant Esteve de Granollers. Both earlier (if textually difficult) and later declarations of this royal delegation can be found.