Usages of Barcelona

The Usages of Barcelona (Usatges) were the fundamental customary laws and basic rights of Catalonia, codified beginning in the twelfth century with the earliest compilations attributed to Ramon Berenguer I, Count of Barcelona, who ruled from 1035 to 1076. They blended Roman law, Visigothic law, rulings of the comital court of Barcelona and ecclesiastical canons, and although formally binding only within the County of Barcelona, they were applied throughout the wider Principality of Catalonia in practice. King James the Conqueror sought to confirm their primacy before the Catalan Courts in 1251 after judges had applied Gothic and Roman law inconsistently, and the Usages retained real authority until the early eighteenth-century Nueva Planta decrees replaced them with centralized Bourbon legislation. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/