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Rh tinued side by side with those elected by the council. There were usually distinctions between greater and lesser members of the concejo; between nobles (infanzones) and citizens, between holders of office (honoratii) and simple neighbours (vicini), the villagers or townsmen.

Legislation had other sources besides the Fuero Juzgo through the new charters granted by the king. The municipality exercised jurisdiction according to custom and tradition in cases which were not expressly included in their charter. Further, the fueros of the bishop and the lords contributed an element to the legislation of the period, just as did the municipal councils.

The inhabitants of Leon and Castile lagged far behind the Muslims in point of material comfort. Agriculture, limited as yet by the bare necessities of life, was fostered by the Benedictine monks alone, and for the most part the population confined its energies to war. Industries, however, sprang up at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia round the shrine of St James, and craftsmen began to organise gilds. The salt industry, too, was kept up in Galicia. But there was less freedom of trade than in the preceding period, and taxation generally took the form of duties imposed on the necessaries of life. Money was scarce, and Roman and Gothic types of coin were still current. The official language was Latin; but Romance was already a formed language, although there are no documents extant in the vulgar tongue till the end of the eleventh or the beginning of the twelfth century.

Scarcely anything is known of Aragon and Navarre at this period. In Catalonia, a West Frankish fief, the Franks exercised a profound influence on the organisation of society. Here the counts were landowners, who granted or leased out their lands, and this practice gave rise to the copyholders (censatarios), the viscounts and other subordinates of the count. Later, the grant of lands by the king to soldiers, whether in the shape of alods or in that of beneficia, led to the formation of a fresh group of free owners. Thus the nobility of Catalonia acquired the full powers of French feudal seigneurs. The common law of all three realms was the Fuero Juzgo, to which Catalonia added the Frankish capitularies. There were also charters for towns in Aragon and Navarre, but their text has not come down to us, while the fuero of Sobrarbe is generally regarded as a forgery. In Catalonia there are extant the fuero of Montmell, the town charter of Cardona given by Wifred, and the privilege of Barcelona granted by Berengar-Raymond I.

The history of Spain, so far traced, is very different from that of other Western countries. No land is more marked out by its mere geography and local separations as the very home of rival kingdoms. It fronts towards the sea, and it looks towards Africa: if it borders upon modern France, it is yet separated from it by the almost impassable Pyrenees. It still bore the imperishable marks of Roman rule: it had been flooded by the Teutonic invaders when the Empire fell, and it had been by then even more closely joined to Africa. Then it was again