It might perhaps be useful to begin by surveying developments during recent years in defining the concept of feudalism and, more particularly, of Catalan feudalism.

Only fifteen or twenty years ago, when historians spoke of féodalisme, or rather of féodalité, they meant, for the most part, a juridical system based on vassalage and the fief. The study of this system belonged, therefore, to institutional rather than to social history. Even when such studies extended to society, its upper strata was almost all that was considered; no other ‘feudal’ relations, in fact, were conceived of than those which bound vassals (indeed, only noble vassals) to their lords. When the history of the peasantry was addressed (which was rare), it was always outside the feudal context. The research of the last twenty years, associated with a more interdisciplinary approach, has discredited this excessively narrow juridical conception of the feudal order. As early as 1978 the conference at Rome on the feudal structures of the Mediterranean West, despite reservations on the part of some participants, proposed a wide definition of feudalism, seen both as a ‘system of institutions’ and as a ‘structure of production and profit’. It is this definition which will be used here, and without reservation.

As for Catalan feudalism, twenty years ago it was hardly perceived except as a marginal and imperfect variant of a feudal order designated as classic, that of the region between the Loire and the Rhine.