Land and Society in Golden Age Castile  David E. Vassberg
Chapter 4  Private Property Ownership: The Privileged Estates
[90] The communitarian system -- itself highly complex, as we
have seen -- was juxtaposed with various types of private
property ownership to form a sort of hybrid property structure.
The system of sixteenth century Castile contained many medieval
elements alongside modern property holding forms -- the
seigneurial system superimposed upon relatively free villages,
the traditional communitarianism side by side with modern
private property ownership, and a vigorous expansionist ethic
coexisting with the old subsistence mentality. The overlapping
of private and community property ownership formed a
complementary, and relatively harmonious relationship in the
typical Castilian village, and constituted the economic basis
for rural society. Historians have made much of the inequitable
distribution of landownership between the nobility, the clergy,
urban investors, and the peasantry. But as Slich