ET PER UBI POSUERINTIS VESTROS PEDES IURARE. La cojuración y el posible uso de los signos podomorfos en la Galicia medieval y moderna

Abstract

This works offers a proposal on the acceptable use of the podomorph carvings in Galicia. The two concerned theories will be checked for it. Firstly, that of J. Ferro Couselo, who put out a chronology and some completely historical uses to them. Secondly, that of M. V. García Quintela and J. Santos Estévez, who interpreted them as mythological and ritual symbols connected with the Celtic royalty of the Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. Departing from the Galician Early Medieval documentation and from the study of the Visigothic, Castilian and later Spanish juridical sources, it is concluded that the above mentioned carvings were possibly marking signs of boundaries associated with the juridical process of the accomplishment of the apeos (fixing of land limits or boundaries) a perfectly known process, a part of which was a cojuramento (collective oath) and also regulated since the Liber Iudiciorum up to the contemporary civil law. The practical disappearance of the apeos and of the writings of the apeos in the Galicia of the Modern Era would explain in addition the need of the using of these marking signs on the stones.