Els "clamores" de Sant Cugat contra el fill del gran senescal i altres episodis de terrorisme nobiliari

Abstract

Sometime during the closing days of 1161 or the beginning of 1162, the monks of the Benedictine abbey of Sant Cugat del Vallès, near Barcelona, composed a memorial of complaint addressed to Count Ramon Berenguer IV. In it they denounced acts of violence committed against the men and property of the monastery by various nobles, most notably Guillem de Moneada, son of the seneschal, Guillem Ramon. This memorial is one of the most detailed and original querimoniae to have survived. Written in correct Latin and with a certain attention to style, this product of the monastic scriptorium is a unique literary witness to the way in which the arbitrary lordship of the barons was experienced by the peasantry in twelfth-century Catalonia. This article offers an introduction, historical study, and edition of this source, to date almost entirely overlooked by scholars because it remained uncatalogued along with other undated documents from the monastery's archive. Persons named in the text are identified, the sequence of events is reconstructed, and suggestions are offered as to the date of the document, the reasons that led the monks to redact it, and their less obvious motivations.