THE LIBRARY OF IBERIAN RESOURCES ONLINE The Episcopate in the Kingdom of León in the Twelfth Century

[87] The acta which have come down to us from the sees of León are few, and the incidence of survival is uneven. The lesser bishoprics have left us very few indeed: we have only one from Coria, two from Ciudad Rodrigo, seven from Orense, twelve from Tuy, thirteen from Mondoñedo. Some of the more important bishoprics have produced almost as few: there are only nine from Salamanca, ten from Astorga, and sixteen from Oviedo. The greatest see has left us, appropriately, the largest number of acta; we have fifty from Santiago de Compostela. Zamora and Lugo are close behind, with forty-eight and forty-five respectively, while from León there are thirty-six.(1) This paucity of documents is thrown into relief by comparison with the state of affairs in England. The acta of the bishops of Chichester between 1075 and 1207 run to over 150.(2) Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury has left us over 300.(3) Gilbert Foliot's acta, as bishop of Hereford and London, number 187,(4) Stephen Langton's as archbishop of Canterbury 143.(5) This shortage of acta from the Leonese sees is in itself interesting. Of course much material may have perished accidentally. Thus, for instance, the archives of the cathedral of Astorga were almost completely destroyed by fire in 1810. Again, Spanish care for records has been, and unfortunately too often still is, extraordinarily slovenly. Yet even when every allowance has been made it remains true that Leonese bishops, and indeed Spanish bishops generally, [88] did not produce the sheer volume of documents that marks the work of their contemporaries in twelfth-century England.(6)