242 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINdonations of lesser benefactors.^27 Other houses, as far as their surviv-
ing records go, only attracted less distinguished concern. But who-
ever the patrons and however small many of the individual gifts
that monasteries received, the surviving charter evidence, which only
represents a fraction of what once existed, demonstrates a wide-
spread interest in monastic foundation and endowment in tenth-and
eleventh-century Leon and Galicia.
The Rule of St Benedict, that had become the principal guide to
the organisation of monastic life in many other parts of west em Europe
during the ninth and tenth centuries, had at this time made virtually
no impact on Spain outside of Catalonia, where it was imposed by
Carolingian patronage and example, and it was not to do so much
before the reign of Alfonso VI (1072-1109) in Castille. Some of the
monasteries of the Leonese kingdom, such as Samos in the diocese
of Orense in Galicia, had originated in the Visigothic period, and it
is likely that the Rule of St Fructuosus, their founder, was still em-
ployed. Monastic pacts made between monks and their abbots, that
first appear in the Visigothic kingdom, continued to be employed in
Galicia, Castille and the Rioja into the tenth century. No examples of
these have come from Leon and it has been suggested that such
agreements were not employed there and represent a Galician pecu-
liarity that was later deliberately introduced into the newly colonised
frontier regions of Castille and the upper Ebro.^28 However, this may
reflect no more than the random survival of our evidence.
Monasteries were the educational centres of the kingdom. The few
extant manuscripts tell us a little about this but more informative are
a small number of lists of books, principally to be found in wills,
which give some impression of the lost literary resources of these
houses.^29 Neither the Asturian nor the Leonese realms can be re-
garded as having made any major or original contribution to intellec-
tual culture. The only new works to have been composed within their
frontiers were the monk Beatus of Liebana's voluminous Commentary
on the Apocalypse of 786 and the brief contribution that he and his
friend Etherius made to the Adoptionist controversy in the form of
their letter to Elipandus of 785. The Commentaty, although of vital
importance in having preserved otherwise lost fragments of earlier
patristic exegesis of the Apocalypse, was purely a labour of compila-
tion. However, Beatus's citations show that he did have works by
Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Tyconius and Fulgentius to hand to aid
him in his task, as well as texts of Spanish authors such as Apringius