The western church before the middle of the eleventh century has been labelled an Adelskirche by German historians. That is to say, the church, its clergy and its properties were to all intents and purposes subordinated to the interests of the lay aristocracy. Proprietary churches and monasteries had been a characteristic feature of the landscape in most regions of the West for generations. But the progressive secularisation of church property appears to have undergone a spectacular acceleration in the tenth century, so that by c. 1050 the vast majority of churches and monasteries lay under the ‘protection’ – for which we should read ‘ownership’ – of secular patrons.

Recent studies of this phenomenon in León and Castile have demonstrated how deeply rooted the institution of the proprietary church had become by the late eleventh century. We know, for example, that by 1080 the descendants of Count Alfonso Díaz possessed no fewer than eleven monasteria and shares in eight others spread across the regions of the Liebana, the Tierra de Campos and the lower Pisuerga, and even as far west as the Bierzo. Likewise, in Cantabria and Galicia, the vast majority of churches and monasteries appear to have rested in secular hands. Noblemen controlled the churches and their endowments in the same manner they did any other piece of property. They enjoyed the tithes and other revenues that corresponded to them; they could partition them among their heirs; and they could choose to reside in any of their ecclesiastical possessions if they were incapacitated by illness or old age.