The third volume of Burns edition of the Valencian charters of James I of Aragon is actually the second volume of charters, the first volume having been devoted to a rich account of the distinctive chancery culture of the Crown of Aragon made possible by the introduction of paper as a writing medium. A striking characteristic of this selection, with the documents chosen by date alone, is how much consistency they have as a group, suggesting that the King was accustomed to focusing on certain issues. Such an issue was the Royal Canal of Alcira. According to the geographer Joan Mateu, the Ribera del Jucar, a great and fertile river valley that the king was to transform into a giant wheat-growing breadbasket (with rice paddies in some areas), had been irrigated by Muslims, but not from the river. Rather irrigation was spring-based and small-scale. James I, thinking grandly, wanted to harness the river to his agricultural engine. Because this was a royal canal, the irrigation officer, the sequier, was not elected, which was the almost universal procedure in Valencian irrigation, but elected annually. One of his tasks was to collect the irrigation maintenance tax (sequiatge) and to pay himself a handsome salary of 500 sous out of it. The tendency of such a centralized administration for irrigation was to draw away revenues originally designed to keep the system in control, a point that the king soon afterwards realized.
Burns has a habit of inventing stilted neologisms for terms perfectly well known in the technical literature. An example here is his translation of assut, a diversion dam, by dyked conduit. No doubt he wanted to better convey the physical nature of such a structure as encompassing in a single unit a dam (a dyke-like structure that raises water) and a canal into which the water is diverted. But not all such dams raise water, so the more generic expression (diversion dam) is less confusing.
Many of the documents relate to the distribution of parcels in the service area of the new canal. Burns sees the canal and the new settlement patterns it created as part of a process whereby both physical space itself and its human geographical features were redesigned. Part of this process involved a legal redefinition of villages (alqueries) as units of agricultural settlement. Muslim villages had been organized collectively, along clan or segmentary lines, and as a result they had no marked boundaries, nor were individual agricultural parcels surveyed, a state of affairs that bewildered the Christians and was the cause of numerous law suits. In one such case from 1269 (document 885), the king established a rule of thumb for establishing the boundaries of villages, namely a line encompassing those areas which the Saracens of the same village were accustomed to cultivate, returning then on the same day of their work to that village. Such decisions, while logical to the Christians, constituted a blow against the communal organization of Muslim village society (in those areas where Muslims remained).
Minority relations are salient. Judicial authority and jurisdiction was split between royal justice and the communal law court of the Muslim or Jewish minority. But the precise split had to be worked out in practice. So in Cocentaina (1264) civil judgment was assigned to the qadi, using Islamic law, while criminal justice was the province of the town bailiff. But later the king had stipulate that in the Muslim quarter of that town, civil cases were heard by the qadi, while criminal jurisdiction did not fall to the justiciar of Cocentaina but rather to the bailiff, who also hears cases according to sunna. A second document clarified the point that the town bailiff had jurisdiction in the Muslim quarter, but only as an enforcer of Islamic law.
The notion of royal justice supporting and enforcing the religious laws of the minorities was a commonplace. In a 1229 document on the tax obligations that Jews of the city of Valencia owed to their own community, the king promises avoid giving special exemptions to members of the community. To put some teeth into the promise, he further stipulates that any Jew claiming such an exemption can be subject to communal ban (Hebrew, herem) and suffer minor excommunication (nidui gamur): "possitis ponere in herem et in nidui gamur". It was typical of James to import legal terminology from Jewish and Islamic law directly into Latin, thus infusing selected minority communal laws with civil authority.
All of the documents are prefaced by precis, some of which almost constitute a translation and all of which are extremely helpful as guides through the often stilted legalese of the charters. In a preface, Burns has provided a short, but exquisitely lucid comment, on those areas of society and culture illuminated by this set of documents.