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Accountable to the community? Medieval officials in Castile: the perspective from below

Martín Romera, MÁ; (2020) Accountable to the community? Medieval officials in Castile: the perspective from below. Journal of Medieval History , 46 (5) pp. 552-571. 10.1080/03044181.2020.1829686. Green open access

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Abstract

The article discusses the role of the population in shifting the accountability of officials from the private to the public sphere in the late medieval period, when these procedures proliferated across Europe. It focuses on Castile in a European perspective as an example of two revealing developments: first, the role of urban representatives in legislation that ensured royal officials would account at the end of their term of office in the localities – despite the reticence of the Crown. Second, it points to flexibility in the use of this procedure, known as residencia and based on sindacato, employed at the discretion of communities and not exclusively at that of the elites. The article advocates reflection on the importance of the population at large generally in enforcing procedures that placed accountability in the hands of the public, and the adoption of a ‘bottom up’ approach to this topic.

Type: Article
Title: Accountable to the community? Medieval officials in Castile: the perspective from below
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1080/03044181.2020.1829686
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2020.1829686
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords: Accountability, officers, history from below, corruption, Castile, sindacato, residencia, enquête
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of History
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10089575
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