I hope that the foregoing has demonstrated that the laws attaching certain peasants to their holdings and subjecting them to their lords were real and effective. Examining routine transactions reveals a set of practices that increasingly limited the economic and personal freedom of peasants in Old Catalonia. Lords were able to forbid departure from their lands and to bind tenants by hereditarily transmissible obligations. Peasants often had to pay substantial sums during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries to purchase the right for family members to move off the land. This redemption payment was the symbolic center of subordinate status in Old Catalonia, and from it the term “remença” arose in the fourteenth century.

Other exactions affecting only certain peasants constituted, along with redemption, indices of servile condition. The so-called mals usos varied in number, sometimes including fines for destruction of property by fire (arsina), or in order to obtain a lord's consent for a daughter's marriage (firma de spoli forçada), but always comprising levies on intestate death, death without heirs, or a wife's adultery. These peculiar incidents, deriving from Visigothic law, took on a boundary-setting function, marking off a substantial portion of rural tenants as in some sense unfree. The bad customs, however, were not merely symbolic, as they were interpreted by lords in such a way as to make tenants liable for large confiscations and thus represented a significant source of seigneurial revenue. Symbolic function and manifest, physical effect were not incompatible.