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Dense Local Knowledge: Grounding Local to Supralocal Relationships in Tenth-Century Castile

A major topic for this volume is to study the bi-directional nature of the relationship between localities and larger-scale social processes. Whilst top-down agency is more readily apparent in our evidence, the ways in which early medieval localities contributed to shape their ‘worlds beyond’ needs also to be problematized. The development of social complexity was in most cases driven by powerful forces operating at the scale of polities, but governance, justice, taxation, aristocratic estates, and so on, needed to be grounded locally, and the ‘local’ was rarely raw clay that could be modeled as desired. The inner rationales of early medieval localities both placed limits on and provided opportunities for supra-local actors, depending on specific contexts. This chapter explores the notion of Dense Local Knowledge as one possible interface between the local and the supra-local, as applied to the specific case of land transactions recorded in charters of the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña in tenth-century Castile. Land is by definition local, and owning and transferring land very much a local affair. Even if the property is large, and even if the owner is a supralocal potentate, the specific plots lie in some locale and are related to other components of local space, and ‘make sense’ together. The reason why they make sense together is that knowledge about landownership is part of the socially determined web of ideas about local space that we call landscape, which is in turn a spatial reflection of local knowledge.

knowledge, is conceptually different from supra-local knowledge. This tends to be selective, rather than holistic. Supra-local actors occupying higher social positions may hold a wider view (knowledge about many different localities), and they may perceive things that are less evident to local people (like the value of a local resource in a long-distance exchange network, or the strategic implications of a locality in a larger territorial articulation), but they hold this knowledge at the expense of high-resolution DLK. When engaged with a specific locality, supra-local actors rarely participate in the continuous making and sharing of local knowledge. They may eventually gain significant knowledge about the locality and its people, provided that they invest the necessary time and effort (think of ethnographers), or make privileged links with local actors, but this can hardly compare with membership of a DLK network. I will call this widerreaching but less dense form of knowledge 'Extensive Supra-local Knowledge' (ESK). 12 Of course, just as local knowledge is accessible to non-local actors, so too can local people gain supra-local knowledge, and, of course, some localities and regions, like coastal settlements, have easier access to information from far away than others. 13 Indeed most local actors have conceptions of the 'world beyond' through personal experience or cultural transmission, and they always have a larger 'world view' that is a crucial component of their self-representation, as Orri Vésteinsson argues convincingly in this volume for medieval Iceland. 14 DLK is, of course, of varying relevance to society as a whole, depending on the capacities of supralocal actors to raise information of enough resolution about the localities which can then be used to secure and reproduce the material basis of social difference. By the same token, it might have been a much more important factor in early medieval state formation than is normally presumed. At this time in Western Europe, large-scale cadastral records were virtually nonexistent and territorial surveys were exceptional and fragmentary. 15 How did elites deal with the problem of identifying the specific land units that came into their possession? In what follows, a charter collection from tenth-century Castile will be analyzed to search for traces of the role of DLK at the interface between the local and supra-local scales to see if and how it influenced the creation of patterns of property relations.

Boundaries and Local Knowledge in the Cardeña Charters
The period considered here ranges from the early tenth century to AD 1038, when the county of Castile formally came to an end. The source materials are the charters transmitted by the cartulary of San Pedro de Cardeña, near Burgos. In the tenth century, Cardeña was the most important monastery in the county of Castile, with strong associations with secular power. During this period, Cardeña developed extensive estates, scattered throughout the central areas of the county and occasionally much further afield. As far as our information goes, by the mid-tenth century Cardeña was a great landowner, second only to the Count of Castile. 16 The evidence for the abbey's accumulation of property is preserved in a late eleventhcentury cartulary, the so-called Becerro Gótico de Cardeña. 17 There are 223 genuine charters spanning the period 899-1038, 141 of them issued to Cardeña, a further 46 originally granted to other monasteries, and 36 recording the deeds of private individuals. Although encompassing a variety of themes, the vast majority of the charters record property transactions (donations, sales, and exchanges), sometimes more than one per charter, so the total figure of recorded land transfers rises to 296. Whilst this represents a substantial corpus which can be used for quantitative analysis, it is crucial to bear in mind that their coverage is uneven 12 Escalona, Alfonso, and Reyes Téllez, 'Arqueología e historia de los paisajes medievales '; pp. 107-113. 13 See Harrison,Medieval Space,. I am grateful to Stuart Brookes's comments on this particular point. 14 Vésteinsson, this volume. 15 Notorious exceptions, like Domesday Book or the Carolingian polyptics show, however, not only the enormous intricacy and variability of local contexts, but also that some institutions achieved astounding capacities for field inquiry, even in the early medieval period. See Devroey, 'Gérer et exploiter la distance'. 16  both geographically-there are huge gaps and over-represented areas-and chronologically: the bulk of the cases group in the period 940-90, with a remarkable peak in the 960s (Fig. 1). Whereas a transfer itself may reflect relations at various scales, from strictly local deals to transactions between high elites, every land plot exchanged has an obvious local dimension. An accurate identification of the property exchanged was necessary to both parties, and indeed those transfers usually contain a wealth of topographical information. However, there were extreme variations, both in conception and intensity, in how each plot was registered. In this paper I will briefly address three aspects of how local knowledge is reflected in charter-making. Firstly, the varying degrees of topographical detail which can be observed; secondly, how local social networks and memory were embedded in boundary clauses; thirdly, the significance of undefined locations and/or boundaries.

Topographical detail: Location and Boundaries
The Cardeña charters include transfers of property ranging from simple units, like an arable field, a vineyard, a vegetable garden or an orchard, and groups thereof (in various quantities), to complex units like and individual's whole inheritance, or even whole villae. Exceptionally lavish donations to the Church could include several, even many villae, but there are no transfers of whole districts or other supralocal discrete units comprising several villae in the Cardeña collection.
The first level in the identification of exchanged land was its location. Larger units, like villae tended to be located by their name, and, if needed, by reference to other adjacent villae, to the district where they lay (alfoz, suburbium, or cognate terms), 18 or--rarely--to larger geographical regions like Castile or the Bureba. 19 The villa in turn was the most frequent locational reference for smaller units, like arable plots or vineyards, although a minority of those cases also referred to districts, valleys 20 or even specific parts of a villa territory. 21 However, location within one villa was the norm.
The size of the properties obviously determines how much detail is needed to identify them; land plots must be singled out from other neighbouring land plots, vineyards from other vineyards, villae from other villae. The bulk of property transactions in the Cardeña charters were of small items such as arable plots, vineyards, meadows, etc. -that is, individual pieces in the mosaic of comparable elements comprising the local agricultural landscape. These needed to be identified with some precision, the boundaries being usually expressed by the names of the owners of the adjacent properties, and by-mostly linear-landscape features, such as roads, footpaths, streams or rivers. 22 In the medieval West there was a long established tradition--derived from the classical quadrangular model of Antiquity--of recording four boundaries, arranged by cardinal points. 23  The Cardeña charters comprise fourteen transfers of larger properties such as sections of pasture and/or woodland, wide-ranging water rights or-rarely-whole villae. The boundaries of some of them were rendered by means of a side-by-side, more-or-less detailed description, sometimes arranged by cardinal points, 24 but in other cases a perambulation, that is, a linear circumnavigation of the limits, was employed. 25 For example, in 972 the boundaries of an enclosed stretch of pasture in Ausín were described by means of a circumnavigation: The last sentence reveals that, although the description is given by cardinal points, the boundaries had been formally recognized-most likely perambulated-by an officer. 27 It is therefore possible that some of the larger transactions involved the perambulation of property even if this was not explicitly recorded or if it was expressed by cardinal points. However, this need not always be the case, especially when the object was a villa. The transfer of a whole villa is a distinctively high-status affair and, in comparison to the rest of the kingdom of León, occurs very rarely in Castile: just 8 times (2.7 %) in the Cardeña charters. 28 When being transferred, most villae were not perambulated, nor described in any detail. Sometimes only the village name was cited (2 cases), maybe adding the name of the district (1 case), or at most citing the adjacent villae (2 cases The donation also included grazing rights 'within the same boundaries' (per ipsis terminis) down to the river Cabia, which means that at least twice the existence of villa boundaries was mentioned, though they were never specified. The same can be presumed for all the aforementioned transfers of villae: they all had precise boundaries, but there was apparently no need to write them down. [We order and establish for Villafría to remain firmly in the hands of the servants of the aforesaid monastery, according to its boundaries and exits, from Ecclesia Alba to Orbaneja and from Villayuda to Castañares, and from the same village Castañares up to Villa Báscones and from those villages downwards, with access to the river Arlanzón just as you obtained it from the first population in the time of the previous princes, our grand-parents and our parents, and just as our servants Zuleiman and Aiub delimited and assigned. And from this moment on, let you firmly possess all that and defend it against any disturbance from the people or the counts.] 29 Although not a proper perambulation, as it only defines the southern limits of Villafría's territory, the charter mentions the formal recognition on the ground by royal officers, and the final sentence clearly hints at some kind of conflict that made it necessary to review and confirm the boundaries. Nevertheless, villa limits are clearly given in broad strokes, taking for granted a more detailed knowledge of each villa's precise limits. Perhaps more strikingly, another charter of 963 records the donation of two villages. The first, San Martín, is located merely by reference to the district (alfoz) of Burgos; however, the second, Orbaneja de Picos (nearby Villafría), is defined by a rough perambulation of its boundaries: Villa boundaries only exceptionally required detailed records because they already existed in local knowledge. 30 It follows that whenever villa boundaries are described in detail, even with the intervention of royal or comital officers, we can envisage that either the charter reacted to an existing conflict or was trying to prevent a future one. Maybe also, it sanctioned some kind of alteration to the existing limits, as may have been the case of Orbaneja de Picos, whose written limits include rights to the riverside pastures of the Arlanzón, potentially in conflict with several neighbouring settlements. The area around Orbaneja and Villafría seems to have been a contested part of Cardeña's domains, which perhaps would invite us to see the boundary clauses in those charters as later additions, as certainly several other documents relating to that area were manipulated, if not entirely forged, by monks in the eleventh century. However, there are grounds for believing the 931 charter to be genuine. The statement that two royal servants (pueros) recognized the Villafría territory in situ, is paralleled in other transactions of the tenth century, 31 perhaps indicating that the area was already in dispute from this time. illustrated in another charter from 947, in which the aristocrat Vermudo Gudéstioz donated to Cardeña the villa called Lacio (location unknown), which he had previously obtained in a lawsuit settled by the count of Castile. He describes his villa as being by its 'ancient boundaries', but then goes on to specify them: 'from the boundaries of villa Cistierna and the road that leads to Castile, and on the other side, the road that leads to Poza; and on the other side the fountain called Sabuco…'. 32 Lacio's 'ancient boundaries' were surely well known to the locals, but the fact that the transfer derived from a conflict probably demanded a more explicit description. Whenever large land units were well known locally-as is the case of villa territories-their being transferred apparently did not necessarily require a perambulation of their boundaries. This only seems to have happened when a conflict existed or whenever land divisions were created de novo. In our monasticbiased Cardeña records, the clearest examples are the donations to the abbey of enclosed woodland or pasture (see below), or the definition of exclusive jurisdictional spaces around the monastery itself. 33 Perambulations entailed a dialogue between supra-local actors and the local community. Persons of authority (or their delegates) had to be present, witnesses were required, landmarks (rocks, crosses, trees) were identified or created afresh. Unfortunately, the Cardeña cartulary does not include an appropriate example, but another charter from San Salvador de Oña (O12, 1011) from the end of the comital period, describes a similar event in great detail. Count Sancho García established the boundaries of a large area over which Oña had exclusive rights to pasture and woodland. The ceremony was led by the count, who was accompanied by two judges, nine local elites (infanzones), and 'all others who are in the vicinity'. The boundaries were described in great detail and penalties were established for whoever contravened Oña's privilege. The deed was acknowledged by the infanzones, who pledged to abide by the settlement and signed the document.
The performative character of such practice has been emphasized by several authors, 34 and is discussed in detail by Alex Langlands in this volume. The formal recognition of boundaries, the writing down of dispositions, their public reading, the witnessing, probably the oath-taking, and signing, all amounted to a kind of momentous ceremony of landscape changes (both physically and socially) that could imprint itself in local memory, forming DLK. Moreover, the process was two directional, because such a procedure demanded a previous inquiry 'to survey collective knowledge about the rights of different property-holders', 35 and, importantly, to establish the relevant landscape features and their namessomething that could only be done through local oral memory. This was a complex operation: well-known, perhaps very old, marks and names were assembled to define a land division that could be completely new. Again, a very similar process can be envisaged in some of the very detailed Anglo-Saxon boundary clauses. 36

Local Memory and Social Networks
The extant Cardeña charters preserve precious traces of a densely symbolized landscape that is, for the most part, irretrievably lost. This can be seen in the process of naming, by which unremarkable physical features become individualized; singling them out from their class. Thus, the strictly local references employed in boundary clauses, like fountains, streams, trees, or rocks, turn into characters in the landscape: fons de Amato, via de pruno, vallis de Ermegildo. 'In a fundamental way names create landscapes', as Chris Tilley put it. 37 The unwritten catalogue of names and meanings given to landscape features forms an essential aspect of DLK, and they are entwined in repeated everyday actions that reproduce and reinforce the collective appropriation of local space by its dwellers. Boundary markers in charters must be seen as the tip of the iceberg of a much denser lexicon of field names, boundaries, and topographical features, which 32 … de termino de uilla Cisterna et de strata qui discurrit ad Castella; et de alia parte strata qui discurrit ad Poza; et de alia parte, fonte qui dicitur Sabucu… (C59, 947). 33 Unfortunately the one that has been preserved for Cardeña is a forgery, C158 (972). The much more modest case of San Martín de Modúbar, can be taken instead as a reliable example, C43 (944). 34 See Bowman,Shifting landmarks, for Catalonia, and more generally Geary, 'Land, Language and Memory'. 35 Bowman,Shifting landmarks,p. 194. 36 Langlands, this volume. 37 Tilley, A phenomenology of landscape, p. 19.
were connected to memories, personal recollections, and family/community stories: 'Why this should be so is embedded in the function, status and role of objects as aide-memoire. Objects are culturally constructed to connote and consolidate the possession of past events associated with their use and ownership'. 38 DLK has a fundamental temporal dimension, although on the evidence of charters it is difficult to gauge how far back it went. About 10% of the Cardeña transactions contain inserts of local memory, mostly small hints about the transferred good's history, as in two donations of 950 (C67, C73) which included plots that the donors had previously bought from other owners, or more explicitly in 915: 'et alio agro qui est in plano, quem comparaui de Munnio frater et dedi illi uno lecto; et alio agro qui es iusta uinea de fratres in VIIII solidos conparato' (another field on the plain that I bought from from frater Munio for one bed; and another field by the monks' vineyard that I bought for nine solidi...) (C9). An exchange of 935 (C26) sheds more light on the circulation of local property. A woman received from Cardeña a field in Ubierna that had formerly belonged to frater Juan, together with another field in Arlanzón which had been her own brother's. 39 The latter plot had belonged to the woman's kindred, then passed to Cardeña, before finally reverting to her. In this case, and in C232 (1033), which remarks that the donor held the three transferred vineyards by inheritance from his father and the latter had them from his father, we can easily infer an interest, not only in locating the property, but also in laying a claim about legitimate ownership that could, if needed, stand up in court. 40 Most such historical references are nuggets of information about small plots provided by the donors or vendors of similarly small plots; however, they are also sometimes found in high-status transfers of large parcels as information about adjacent land holdings. For example, in 963 (C110) the noble woman Fronilde, together with some relatives, donated to Cardeña a large stretch of woodland, defined by a long perambulation. The landmarks included 'the valley of Ferrero, which is a field of Gomiz Belaza, which he bought from the brethren of Cardeña', and 'the land of Romano Munioz, which formerly belonged to Liciniano'.
In every locality, shared knowledge of property relations was an essential factor of local sociability. This is made visible in the written records mainly through the practice of naming adjacent landowners in transactions. Far from being a private affair, possessing property in the locality affected the whole community, and knowing who owned what was essential information for all households. In the absence of comprehensive property records, only local knowledge could account for land-ownership and its changes with enough precision. This must have constituted a tight web of knowledge about past and present owners and about the links between their families, of which property transfers were often a vehicle. Sadly, our sources cannot illuminate sufficiently those relationships because for most villages we rarely have more than one or two charters, and when we do, they tend not to overlap temporally or spatially. There are exceptions, though, and in those cases the influence of DLK in the dealings between local and supra-local parties becomes much more evident.
For example, several blocks of the Cardeña cartulary record the monastery's expansion over a holm-oak woodland (Elzinetum = Modern Spanish 'encinar') to the southeast of their protected jurisdictional space (cautum) in between the districts (alfoces) of Ausín, Juarros and Burgos. This process took place in 963-75 and is recorded in ten charters, with a further expansion documented in the mideleventh century. Some of those charters present slight issues with their dates, but can generally be accepted as valid for reconstructing the process. Before 963 Cardeña was in possession of a woodland enclosure (defesa), the acquisition of which is undocumented. This initial property was expanded with two large stretches of woodland donated by the aristocrats Fronilde and Diego Gudéstioz (C110, 963; C115, 964), and later on by another separate large enclosure that the count of Castile acquired (C153, 972) and 38  then donated to the monastery (C157, 972). As was to be expected with newly created divisions, all three deeds-especially C115-provided detailed boundary descriptions of rich topographical information, including not only micro-toponyms but also mentions of adjacent landowners. In parallel Cardeña extended its exclusive woodland by purchasing small plots from local landowners, as recorded in six extant charters. 41 Taken together, the eight charters from 963-65 contain 174 mentions of 115 different persons, as donors/sellers, owners of adjacent properties, and witnesses, thus constituting an exceptional window into local society. 42 Nineteen named individuals are clearly aristocrats, including the count of Castile and several members of his family. Besides the abbot of Cardeña, a further nine clerics are recorded (two abbots and seven priests), but with few exceptions there is little to suggest that they are anything other than local clerics. All the rest seem to be local people from the neighbouring villages.
To dissect exhaustively this material is beyond the scope of this paper, but some facts are worth noting. Firstly, as is to be expected, most high-status actors-the count of Castile included-feature as witnesses in the two aristocratic donations. However, the brothers Román Muñoz and Vermudo Muñoz seem to be quite active in the local scene. Not only were they co-donors with their aunt Fronilde in the 963 donation, but they also featured in the same charter as holding adjacent properties in the area. Moreover, they appear in the first and second position of the witness lists in four of the six purchase records. Since the latter were essentially local affairs, it seems that both siblings were especially influential in the area, and in fact, their occurrences in the Cardeña charters are restricted to the areas neighbouring Cardeña to the southeast. Although their noble status seems clear, they might be primarily local notables, with kinship links to the aristocracy. They represent an intermediate position between strictly local people and strictly supra-local aristocrats and their access to local sociability networks seems to have been more direct, hence their role as witnesses.

Deed:
C111 (963) Secondly, with so few records it is hardly surprising that most individuals are mentioned only once, but five transactions involving local people look a lot more compact (Table 1): Tello Feles occurs four times, once as a witness and three times as an adjacent owner; Donno was seller in one charter, and witness in four; Tello Liciniani, Munio Ratáriz and Tuderico were witnesses four times each, and so on, and this is only a small group of charters affecting a minimal portion of the local territory. Clearly local people tended to get involved in each other's transactions. Today's seller would be tomorrow's witness or his property could be mentioned by way of reference. 43 Besides, larger-scale operations affecting the locality were also grounded in local society, as evidenced by the fact that some local actors, like Munio Franco, Tello Feles, Muño Ratariz or Gómez Belaza, also feature as either adjacent owners or witnesses (or both) in the highstatus donations of Fronilde and Diego Gudéstioz (C110 and C115). Thirdly, although local communities and higher-status groups belonged to structurally different social scales, they were all grounded in that local landscape. Aristocratic donations employed accurate information supplied by locals and in turn aristocratic property, from the moment it was created, became just another component of the local landscape to be learnt and referred to as need be. Even if we assume that it was only the local population that really had access to the everyday oral mechanisms of sharing DLK, higher actors could have different degrees of connection into these networks. Whilst the count of Castile obviously only acted locally because of the aristocratic implications of Cardeña's expansion, other characters, like Román and Vermudo Muñoz were clearly much more involved in, and--conceivably-informed about local affairs.
All those interactions underscore the risk of seeing land transfers in early medieval localities primarily under the prism of a 'land market' made of a steady flow of transfers of 'private property'. 44 Certainly, land plots must have changed hands quite fluidly, not only through sales and exchanges, of which only a minimal fraction are recorded, but also through marriage and inheritance. A notion of 'doing business' might underlie some sales and exchanges--even some donations 45 --but there is every reason to reject seeing them as 'private' operations. The various ways in which local actors participated in their neighbours' deals shows that those were a matter of the utmost local relevance, and in some sense quintessentially 'public', that is, a matter of common knowledge. The object of many such transfers was not just a stretch of land, but the right to exploit it and to participate in a number or local resources that belonged to the sphere of the 'commons', such as paths and roads, waters, pastures and so on. 46 Communal uses were also strongly linked to common rights and obligations, the micro-citizenships of early medieval Castilian communities. Knowing who owned land where necessarily had to be every local actor's business. 43 The pattern is reminiscent of the one described, with much richer evidence, by Davies,Small worlds, The debate on the existence of a 'land market' in the Middle Ages is too large to engage with in this context. See generally Feller and Wickham, Le marché de la terre au Moyen Âge. For Iberia, see the special issue 'El mercado de la tierra en la Edad Media y Moderna. Un concepto en revisión ' in Hispania 191 (1995) and Pastor et. al., Beyond the Market and specifically for the early middle ages Portass, The Village World, esp. pp. 72-79 and 145-49. 45 Davies, 'When gift is sale'; Davies, 'Exchange charters'. 46 Miceli, 'Entre formulismo y enumeración'.

Undefined location and/or boundaries
To end with, we must now turn our attention to the apparently least helpful form of evidence: transactions that do not specify-or hardly specify-the location of transferred goods. Precisely because locating properties and defining their boundaries was so obviously important to transactors, 47 it is striking that nearly 30% of Cardeña records carry little or no such information. About 15 per cent only mention the villa where the plot lay, for example: 'my whole fifth, 48 whatever I may gain or claim, that I possess in the territory of villa Espinosa' (C178, 980), and a further per cent contain no information at all, as in a transfer of 'omnia erentia nostra, terras, uineas, molinos, ortos, domos, armenta, uestimenta, tam mobile quam et inmobile, quod ganauimus uel ganare potuerimus in hoc seculo' (all our inheritance, arable, vineyards, mills, gardens, houses, livestock, clothing, whether assets or real estate, whatever we may have gained or may gain in this life) (C 59 947).
Strikingly, this kind of ill definition never occurs in any of the 35 preserved transactions between private individuals; all cases correspond to transactions between lay people and monasteries or churches. Moreover, a large proportion of undefined or ill-defined locations occur in a particular type of legal affair: the so-called traditiones corporis et animae, 49 which are typical of Castile and particularly abundant among the Cardeña charters, although not unheard of in other collections. 50 By this kind of transaction the donor 47 See, generally, Geary, 'Land, Language and Memory ', p. 176. 48 The expression means the fifth of a person's whole possessions that he/she could freely alienate with no restriction from his/her kindred: see García de Valdeavellano, 'La cuota de libre disposición'. 49 Orlandis Rovira, '"Traditio corporis et animae" '. 50 This was pointed out by Moreta Velayos, El monasterio de San Pedro de Cardeña, p. 102, and more recently by Davies,Acts of giving, established an especially close relationship with a monastery, to which he/she granted his/her body and soul, together with some property which may be as much as his/her whole possessions, and which is often transferred post obitum. This was sometimes a formal way of joining the community either as monk/nun or as a member of the larger monastic 'family', but it also often included elements of patronage, like the monastery's obligation to provide food and clothing, probably also the right to be buried with the monastic community, although this is by no means its only content. 51 It is not possible in this context to elaborate much about the social meaning of traditiones corporis et animae, but it is important to point out that such transactions were exceptional among aristocrats, like that of lady Fronilde who gave herself to Cardeña with three whole villages in the alfoz of Burgos (C109, 963). Most cases rather seem to correspond to medium-status people, with property in just one or a few localities (although in many cases this cannot be gauged only from the charter's information). It is likewise relevant that sometimes-but not in most cases-traditiones corporis et animae ended up in a dispute between the beneficiary church and the donor or, more often, his or her kin. This may imply that, although formally the act of an individual these transactions actually had the practical effect of connecting whole kin groups to the growing patronage networks of monasteries. They seem to have cleared the path for negotiation, whether in the donor's lifetime or after his/her death, and probably the best indicator is the characteristic spatial vagueness of traditiones corporis et animae. Some may specify carefully the transferred property, but most keep to general formulas, like 'my whole inheritance'; 'all I own in the villa named X' or, strikingly, 'all my belongings wherever you may find them'. Naturally, for the monks who received such vague donations the charter itself was of only relative practical help. If they wanted to know exactly what they had been given, there were two options: if the property was referred to as a villa, that could prompt an inquiry with the locals to find out what precisely they had received; 52 if the donation was of the 'all I own' kind (especially if it was also post obitum), the obvious step forward would be to negotiate the contents and terms with the donor's kin; and maybe after that to inquire locally about the whereabouts of each holding.
The Cardeña cartulary has transmitted one charter that may bear testimony of such processes. It is a traditio corporis et animae of 968 (C134) by which Abbot Galindo gave himself to Cardeña, together with all his inheritance and the monastery of San Miguel de Támara which had belonged to his parents. The inheritance comprised arable, vineyards, gardens, orchards, mills, etc., but the charter gives no specific location. However, after the dating clause and the signature of Galindo and those of 'all the men from Castro Támara' ('omnes viris de Castro Tamara hic sunt testimonias') follows a comprehensive breakdown of the transferred property that looks like an addition to the original charter that was copied seamlessly into the cartulary. What is most interesting in this list is that at one point it mentions the land that 'belonged to my mother' ('fuit the mea ama') and, more strikingly, one vineyard of 'Don Galindo, mi relative' ('vinea de domno Galindo, meo coiermano'). This points to an inquiry of the contents of the transfer involving Cardeña and the donor's kin group. We cannot be sure how soon after the donation this took place, but it clearly involved people from Abbot Galindo's generation.
In other words, although at first sight one would think that undefined locations are unhelpful to the study of local knowledge, the opposite is actually the case. Some kind of-characteristically mediatedaccess to DLK was indispensable in realizing these grants. Moreover, such donations were more than just property transfers: the gift actually marked the beginning of a longer negotiation between the donors' kindred and the monastery, which would often be not only a superior force and a source of patronage, but also an intruder in the local pattern of land ownership. Sadly, the details of such a relationship cannot be retrieved from the extant evidence.

Discussion
This paper has tried to demonstrate the relevance of Dense Local Knowledge as an interface between local and supra-local actors in tenth-century Castile. As in most societies, DLK was a constantly changing body of shared notions and ideas that worked as an archive of local identities, relationships and histories. It also shaped local landscapes, embedding personal, family and community memories in landscape as a symbolic matrix that emerges only sparingly in our records. The surviving evidence allows few glimpses into these webs of knowledge; '[m]uch that society needs to know is transmitted experientially', as Patrick Geary put it. 53 DLK was mainly transmitted through ephemeral channels that are lost to modern scholars: everyday work, casual conversations, rituals, festivals, disputes, tales, proverbs, poems, songs, games and stories. DLK's role as an oral register of land ownership is only a secondary aspect of a much wider sphere of interactions, but it is the one that has left enough traces in the extant written sources to be investigated. A close inspection of the Cardeña charters reveals that much of its appearance and functioning needs to be understood in light of the interactions between local society and supra-local actors who recognized DLK as a major resource to gain public recognition of land ownership and to defend it in court.
The Cardeña charters contain expressions of DLK of varying kinds and intensities: (1) Of all recorded legal affairs, piecemeal sales of small land plots are the closest to local practice. Few transactions between lay people survive, but surely many more took place in strictly lay local contexts, without major church involvement. 54 No doubt many of those were formalized orally, as was not infrequent in medieval and early modern Castile, but a lot of charter making surely happened in the localities too. Wendy Davies' identification of strands of local and micro-regional scribal practice must be related to such a tradition. 55 Whether oral or written, when local land changed hands, the whole community was concerned. This is apparent in the substantial numbers of local people involved in sales and donations, and the ways in which they swapped roles from vendor/donor to witness of other deeds, to acting merely as locational references for the transferred plot. In his discussion of the rich Catalonian contemporary evidence, Jeffrey Bowman points out that the local witnessing of land was a 'form of engaging the memory of the community' and this is surely also true of Castile. 56 Moreover, the fact that mentioning adjacent landowners was the preferred method to locate small-scale local transfers clearly puts the stress on people, not topography. Local landowners were supposed to know who their neighbours were and such knowledge was publicly shared in the community and could be retrieved in case of conflict. 57 Snippets of its ritual, performative nature are fragmentarily preserved in the mentions of actors and/or witnesses having read and heard the terms of the transaction. 58 (2) DLK was employed by supra-local actors in different ways. Transactions of small plots by high-status people often kept to a similar formula, in their mention of the village, adjacent owners, local witnesses, etc. This is well illustrated by a later example from the cartulary of Sahagún, in the center of the Duero plateau (Sahagún, 4, 1180(Sahagún, 4, , 1110. The text narrates how in the 1090s an aristocrat named Gonzalo Núñez decided to build a palatium by acquiring a large number of small land plots situated around a church he already controlled. To this end, 'he started to enquire who were those who possessed the land that lay by the church of San Salvador'. When he found out, from those who told him (cumque a dicentibus cognouisset…), he negotiated an exchange. Over the next decade, he arranged many other piecemeal sales and exchanges until he completed the desired estate.
This case shows eloquently the importance of gaining information from the locals. However, when new divisions were made in the landscape, more impacting methods, like perambulations, were used. Perambulations are often understood in the literature as the quintessential form of boundary recording in the early middle ages. By contrast, the evidence of the Cardeña charters shows this procedure as something rather exceptional. It occurs only in a minority of cases, and responds to very specific circumstances; it affects only very large land units, never small agricultural plots (where mentioning adjacent landholders would suffice), and it happens either in the case of the creation of a new unit that modifies the existing 53 Ibid., p. 173. 54 Kosto, 'Sicut mos esse solet'. 55 Davies, 'Local Priests and the Writing of Charters' and this volume. 56 Bowman,Shifting landmarks, This is rarely documented in detail in the early medieval period, but it shows very clearly in later dates. For a very fine analysis of a Castilian thirteenth-century dispute inquiry see Alfonso Antón and Jular Pérez-Alfaro, 'Oña contra Frías'. 58 A similar point in Geary,'Land,Language and Memory',p. 175. landscape, or in the case of conflict, as a way to terminate or prevent a dispute. But could there be a perambulation without local knowledge? As Alex Langlands shows eloquently in this volume, DLK was no less involved in perambulations of Anglo-Saxon boundaries. It had to be mobilized in order to recognize boundaries on the ground, in a way that often embedded local detail (place-names, landholding, local history and memories) and had a strong ritual character, as seen in the Oña cases described above. Old boundaries were sometimes re-validated. New divisions were sometimes created, but that had to be done using existing landscape features. The scale of such operations, though, is consistently large, ranging from sizeable land units, especially pasture or woodland, to whole villages. In the tenth-century Cardeña charters there are no traces of similar procedures applied to supra-local territories, such as districts, again in contrast to Anglo-Saxon England, where charters sometimes record the boundaries of very large-scale territories, 59 or indeed in contrast to later medieval delimitations of territories such as dioceses, both in Castile and elsewhere.
(3) Negative evidence for DLK is an important aspect of this chapter. For all the local detail that the Cardeña transactions contain, the lack of it is just as striking. I have suggested that the notorious ambiguity of some transactions must implicitly reflect the use of DLK as an interface. This works at different scales; for example, the rarity of descriptions of village boundaries clearly indicates that knowledge of such large, long-lived divisions was locally well established and relatively easy to mobilize if needed. At the opposite end, the many transactions-mainly traditiones corporis et animae-that do not inform about the specific locations, often not even at village level, must imply the opening up of a dialogue between monasteries, kin-groups and locals.
In other circumstances local knowledge, like all other social structures at that level, could be totally overridden by more powerful social actors, as seems to have happened with the Asturian-Leonese expansion south of the Duero, studied by Martín Viso in this volume. However, the Cardeña charters show how members of the Castilian elite used the channels afforded by local societies to build and manage their large-scale patrimonies. They did so by gaining limited, selective access to DLK via their interactions with the locals, and in so doing, they illustrate how the connections between the local and the supra-local could be grounded at the atomised scale. Landscape, however, is here not the subject, but just a metaphor. It represents the local actors without whose participation lordly landownership could hardly be realized; families that could inform about plots in wills, adjacent owners that could be witness to transactions, communities that would keep the memory of those changes. Dense local knowledge is not a database to be searched; it is people to interact with, whether by imposition, negotiation or both, and it reveals itself as a smooth but essential factor in the construction of complexity.

Abbreviations
Charters are cited by collection followed by their number in the referred edition and, if needed, the year of date.