Pere Compte necesita ayuda. Endeudamiento y límites de la solidaridad campesina en la Cataluña del siglo XVI

This articles analyses the peasant impoverishment and social mobility processes in a rural community throughout the 16th century. Using recently unearthed aristocratic and notarial sources. The author expounds an individualized and micro-historical approach located in Vall d’en Bas (La Garrotxa), an area of "Cataluña Vella" where peasant communities had a loose institutional structure. It is argued that in a context of demographic pressure and relative lack of land, indebtedness indicated the limits of peasant solidarity: some of them facing ruin enables others to survive, as it affected the land supply. The alternative was individual fraud contained in the dialectics between the pressure from the nobles and erosion of their rights.