The Vall de Sant Joan and Vallfogona demonstrate the way in which a powerful interest could make its mark on a community. On the other hand, as the presence of Count Oliba and his miles Sanç at the edge signifies, the situation of the area in Sant Joan’s shadow was not usual. Especially on the frontier, historians have come to expect that most areas would have been organised according to the needs of military defence, around castles and towers; such organisation, in the form of the castle of Milany or the comital holdings to the north and west of the Vall de Sant Joan, did indeed loom over the edges of the terra sancti iohannis. The next focus therefore must be on such areas, in an attempt to discover how the pathways lay that linked the holders of secular power. While the previous chapter concerned local village status and the ambiguous place of boni homines and wealthy men in an area of relatively low-level settlement, and the final chapter deals with the counts and their supposed officials, this chapter bridges the gap between the local and the uppermost levels. It shows other ways in which status and power can be seen in the evidence, in what ways it might be or become supra-local, and how such elevated levels interacted with those both above and below them.

A problem is that, in order to have enough evidence to work with, it is necessary to study zones where the Church had enough of an interest for documentation to survive. This in turn militates against being able to escape social patterns that it partly created. None the less, in the areas around the cathedral of Sant Pere de Vic (see map 3), numerous interests clustered that mean that even where Sant Pere preserves evidence it was not always the area’s dominant force. This can be shown by examining three areas and contrasting their different profiles of power. In Malla Sant Pere was heavily present but not visibly active, while other interests in the area appear to have been unconcerned with the term despite a prime location. L’Esquerda, otherwise known as Roda de Ter, once an important power centre, was now a backwater for both the lay and the ecclesiastical powerful despite its apparent potential for any growing localisation of power.