Notaries and Their Contracts

Abstract

Insight into the society and economy of Santa Coloma de Queralt and the surrounding Baixa Segarra region, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, comes almost exclusively from the written records produced by the town’s notarial scribes, who had become organized within a notariate by the last quarter of the thirteenth century. The establishment of this Santa Coloma scribania (the business, workshop, and office of the notariate) occurred hand in hand with the development of the town as a marketplace, and it served as a necessary element in that development. The consistent process of recording transactions in the town’s scribania provided the legal structures and economic memory for efficient commerce, and it combined royal, regional, and local interests in a new economic center of authority. The procedures used by the scribes of Santa Coloma generally correspond to the notarial practices of contemporary Mediterranean Europe, but in Santa Coloma the scribes developed specific practices ref lecting the needs of a rural marketplace, their regional neighbors, and their own status as a new, notarial monopoly staffed by the area’s clerics.