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The Monastic Cartulary A of the archive of the Cathedral of Compostela is the first and foremost of those in this archive.
It is part of the so-called diplomatic cartularies, registers or codices that arose in Christian Spain at the end of the 11th century and during the first third of the 12th century.
As in the case of the Monastic Cartulary A, they were completed by new documents that appeared during the 12th and 13th centuries.
They contained a transcription of documents that were lying around the documentary patrimony of the institutions in question, comprising the privileges, donations, sales, testaments, legal and administrative documents that had been issued in their favour by monarchs, bishops, magnates and private individuals, or documents that had appeared in the institution itself as a result of administrative procedures.
This wealthy patrimony constitutes the legal foundation of their own rights and properties. The cartularies, on which the original documents had been transcribed, were to replace the latter in the event of possible loss.
This is the case of the Monastic Cartulary A, which contains the transcription of 165 original documents, of which only a few from the end of the 12th century and the first half of the 13th century have been conserved. Thanks, then, to this codex, we can examine the documents issued by the monarchs of Asturias-León and by the royal family in favour of the Church of Compostela.
The purpose of these codices, the legal value of this form of handwritten tradition and the importance and evaluation of their content constitute one of the most important sources for the study of the High Middle Ages in Spain.
