Essential to any investigation of Liébana society in the centuries analysed in this book is some discussion of the development of that society in the preceding centuries; to this end, this chapter will introduce the archaeological and documentary sources with which any attempt to do so must be undertaken. It will also analyse important early evidence from the region in order to paint a picture of Liébana society that differs in crucial respects from that of Barbero and Vigil. All historical writing on the Spanish early Middle Ages is locked in a critical dialogue with a vision of society that questions the nature and extent of Romanisation and Visigothic influence in Cantabria and the Asturias. This chapter, and the book as a whole, will argue, contra Barbero and Vigil, that northern Spanish local societies and their political and economic underpinnings were not in any meaningful way ‘tribal’, and that the northern fringe of Spain shared broad socio-economic characteristics with the rest of the peninsula in the post-Roman centuries; it will thus make the case for significant Romano-Visigothic influence in Cantabria from c.500 to c.700. This background created the socio-economic conditions that frame the patterns of landholding and social relations that emerge with increasing clarity as documents become more plentiful after 900.

The evidence in context: monasteries and mountains

In 790 Álvaro and various men and women from Aquas Calidas (Las Caldas), a small hamlet set high above the narrow gorge that leads to the Liébana from the north, decided to record the foundation of their new monastic community in a charter. This document, a simple enough statement of the pact that was to set the rules by which they would live, is the oldest to survive in the cartulary of Santo Toribio de Liébana, the principal source for the region. It is also one of only two surviving eighth-century documents. Some fifteen ninth-century Santo Toribio documents are augmented by only four from the smaller and less well known monastery of Santa María de Piasca, giving in total twentyone documents before 900. It is only when the tenth-century documentation is considered – sixty documents from the Santo Toribio cartulary, plus some twenty-two from Piasca – that we can begin to work with a relatively substantial body of charters.