Few books are as faithful to their title as this. In a revision of his Oxford thesis, Robert Portass examines social and economic relationships in two contrasting village societies in northern and north-western Spain between the Arab conquest of 711 and the end of the caliphate of Córdoba in 1031, in the light of the charter evidence. While the latter is very limited for Liébana, on the western edge of Cantabria, the documentary record of the monastery of Celanova in Galicia (Province of Ourense) is more substantial. As Celanova was only founded in 936, its documents of earlier date concern purchases, sales and exchanges of property that only subsequently came into the hands of the monastery. The two main monastic houses in the Liébana, San Martín de Toriero, which later became Santo Toribio de Liébana, and Santa María de Priesca, are of undated eighth-century foundation, but the same is true of much of their earliest documentary records too. This means that in both regions a body of texts illustrating relationships within village communities has been preserved, as well as texts that record interaction between lay property owners and ecclesiastical institutions.

Portass's main purpose, which is both vigorously and successfully pursued, is to undermine entrenched scholarly interpretations, to be found in Spain and elsewhere, which view these documents as proof of the erosion of peasant social and economic independence and the gradual imposition of feudal relations of dependency across the course of this period. He denies the prevalence of various forms of coercion, through which pressure was placed on those unable to resist in order to make them relinquish property or status on disadvantageous and unequal terms, noting this does not appear in the records themselves. Admittedly, this might not be unexpected if the documents were produced by the monastic institutions, as is almost certainly the case in most instances. Portass does, though, recognise the long-term effects of a tendency, marked in these records, to exchange long-term security for short-term gain, as in sales of land in exchange for foodstuff and drink. However, he argues that free peasant proprietors still formed the main element of village society in both regions at the end of the period studied.

Rather than as evidence of coercion or intimidation, Portass explains the frequency of gift-giving or seemingly unequal exchanges as being explained by the need for social capital. In the ecclesiastical sphere, this can be seen as the acquisition of spiritual reward, via liturgical remembrance, in return for the donation of worldly goods. In the secular world, however, benefits come in the form of more material support, such as when a social inferior buys his or her way into a patronage network through gifts. The line between the two is not hard and fast, as becoming a client of a saint through donations to a monastery housing his relics might result in secular as well as spiritual protection. Whether it did in any of the particular instances recorded in these documents is impossible to say.

The difficulty is that, to take a modern example, giving protection money to the Mafia could also be presented as the acquisition of social capital on the part of the donor. Put another way, an early medieval Galician peasant might have felt equally resentful at being coerced by social pressures or fear of supernatural retribution into gifting valuable property to the Church. Early medieval charters only record the public actions involved in the carrying out of the legal processes, not the thoughts of those involved. So, there is no way of being certain that an exchange of land for food was the consequence of a famine or of a need for social capital. So, Portass's arguments for social capital interpretations of some of the transactions reported in these documents are thought provoking and worthy of careful consideration, but they are no more proven by the records than the views he criticises. What is important, though, is that he has opened up the debate, and provided a valid alternative to Marxist assumptions hitherto dominant.

For each of the two regions, he starts with a brief but very helpful historical introduction and then devotes a chapter to the documentary record that illustrates local social relations before the rise of the dominant monastic institutions, and then another to the period that follows. A fourth chapter in each section then considers the significance of the secular and ecclesiastical elites. In the case of the narrow valleys that comprise the Liébana, these are far more limited in extent and influence than in the more extensively settled southern Galicia, where the relatives of Rosendo Gutierrez, founder of Celanova, formed one of the most powerful and wealthy aristocratic factions not just in Galicia but also in the Asturian and Leonese kingdoms as a whole. This is one of the several marked differences between the two regions chosen for this study that make it so valuable. This includes a very interesting comparison of legal procedures in an area of aristocratic predominance and one, the Liébana, with much less social differentiation and an elite that emerged from the ranks of the richer peasantry but ultimately failed to establish itself. Although, overall, the evidence on which this study is based has limitations that cannot be surmounted, it is used here in challenging and imaginative ways to break down old interpretative certainties and offer new and persuasive alternatives. This book is very much recommended, not just to those interested in the history of the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain, but to all social historians of western Europe in these centuries.