THE CHRISTIAN REALMS 257that later became dependancies of greater ones were often merged
with the general collections of the mother house.
From these rich and varied materials much information can be
gleaned. It is possible to see how, in the period of expanding settle-
ment in the later ninth and tenth centuries, a mass of churches and
tiny monasteries were founded by small landowners, who could some-
times only endow them with a handful of fields and vineyards. Mter
a time this explosive growth slowed and the small foundations, some
of which can have been barely economically self-supporting, were
granted by their owners, for they generally remained proprietary
churches and monasteries, to larger and more flourishing institu-
tions. Some of these were in turn put under the authority of others,
cathedral churches or a handful of greater monasteries. The effect
was a gradual reduction in the numbers of independent and privately
owned churches and monasteries and a greater regulating of church
organisation in the course of the later tenth and eleventh centuries.
It is possible to see, if only from the rather formal viewpoint of
changes in ownership and authority, how much secular interest there
was in the founding of these churches and small monasteries in the
earlier period. There were private institutions, often with slaves at-
tached to them who could be given away at will. In some cases the
founders and their heirs reserved certain rights, such as the selection
of abbots. This could lead to abuses, which by the end of the tenth
century, with the growth of reforming idealism throughout the church
in most of western Europe, became less tolerable. In 1005 the monks
of San Benet de Bages sent a memorial to the papacy in a successful
bid to free the election of their abbots from control by their found-
er's descendants. This family had recently foisted one of their own
number on to the monastery as abbot, who had proved less than
satisfactory in that he had sold some of its books and had then made
offwith a silver chalice and paten. Pope Benedict VIII took the house
under direct papal patronage.^57
Documents like this memorial and a range of other judicial and
quasi-legal texts form a small but significant proportion of the surviv-
ing corpus of charters, most of which comprise deeds of sale or of
gift. Fortunately local practice involved the inclusion of substantial
accounts of proceedings into these records of trials and hearings, in
some cases reporting the statements of participants in direct speech.
Generally disputes were resolved by recourse to groups of witnesses,
the side having 'more or better' of them being in theory the winner,