The stone and the shadow: peasant and aristocratic land appropriation in early medieval Galicia (north‐west Iberia)

This paper explores the social dynamics of land appropriation in early medieval Galicia (north‐west Iberia), focusing on the central role labour played in narratives and practices. To that end, it analyses the entire regional corpus of more than one thousand charters dating before 1100, whose distinctive scriptural practices offer exceptional insight into both local and aristocratic forms of appropriation. The article ultimately argues that land appropriation operated beyond a simple oppositional framework, instead unfolding along a complex continuum between two distinct poles – one peasant and labour‐based, the other aristocratic and grounded in boundary demarcation – within which specific narratives and mechanisms could be deployed across various social scales to sustain domination or, conversely, to articulate resistance.