A Likely Story: purpose in narratives from charters of the early medieval Pyrenees

Despite having no early specifically narrative source materials, the area of modern Catalonia is famously rich in documentary material, contemporary original sources for transactions, judicial hearings and so on. A surprising number of these documents in fact contain narratives. Sometimes these relate to grand events, but more often they are stories particular to the transaction or hearing recorded. Using material from before and shortly after the year 1000, this chapter asks why such stories occur only occasionally, how much weight can be placed on their details given their formulaic medium and what purpose they served. It concludes that, rather than representing an access of realism breaching formulae, the stories acted mainly as a stratagem to make safe the unusual or even fraudulent, working to elicit audience sympathy or cooperation when regular, legal norms were insufficient.