May I pick your brain? Local minds as living cadastres in a Portuguese eleventh-century lawsuit

Abstract

In the context of a dispute with the monastery of Lorvão, in the late eleventh century, the monks of Vacariça, near Coimbra (modern Portugal), carried out a field enquiry in the village of Recardães. This was part of a failed attempt to repossess a number of land plots that they claimed were theirs, but had lost control of. This case is a suitable starting point for a discussion of the fundamental, but often neglected role of Dense Local Knowledge (DLK) in the structuration of aristocratic estates and power relations, in contexts where centralized records of landownership were absent.