A quarter of a century ago research involving work on tenth-century Spanish documentary records required long stints in numerous ecclesiastical and state archives, putting up with their arcane customs and the vagaries of opening times that might be as short as an hour a day, as well as elusive archivists, who on occasion might decide that the hour of opening be entirely different from the one advertised. Lacking the correct temperament a scholar in a hurry, when faced with these obfuscations, might despair, but for those who survived them, the individual eccentricities of each archive became a matter of some delight, as well as a source of stories worthy of frequent repetition. Such heroic days are now largely past, and a distinguished historian of societies on the western periphery of Europe – Wales and Brittany – can write a book such as this without apparently visiting a single archive or referring to a charter other than by mentioning the published edition in which it is to be found. Admittedly this means that she has to take such editions on trust, but most of them are worthy of it. However, it also means that those charters, for example in the Archivo Historico Nacional in Madrid, that have never been included in any modern edition are necessarily overlooked. Again, this may not seem to matter too much, but in her description of the sources upon which her work is based (pp. 22–6), Wendy Davies gives the impression that she is referring to the whole body of such materials, and states that ‘altogether records of approximately 1,960 transactions survive from the region here considered’ (p. 25); this being the north of Spain from Galicia to the central Pyrenees. Catalunya is explicitly excluded. Unfortunately, as well as the individual charters that have never been edited, the author also ignores those to be found in the edited cartularies and charter collections of the cathedrals of Burgos, Lugo, Santiago, Astorga, Orense and Oviedo, and those of the monasteries of Eslonza, S. Salvador de Oña, Santillana del Mar, Irache, Santa María de Nájera, San Pedro de Montes and San Estebán de Ribas de Sil, amongst others. No mention is made of any of these, any more than of the various collections of Aragonese documents other than those of San Juan de la Peña. While this unacknowledged selectivity does not undermine the various social and economic trends in this period that Davies very usefully identifies from her study of these documents, it has the effect of devaluing the numerous statistical tables and calculations that she includes, as these are not based on the totality of the data. Perhaps the old archival approach still has its value.