950-1350
The middle ages and feudal power
Cock-crow announces dawn and new times.
In the scriptorium at Sant Cugat del Vallès – one of the most important monasteries in mediaeval Catalonia – the abbot signs a manuscript on 18th February in the year 992. He has just agreed to sell a vineyard beside Sant Joan Salerm – the church belonging to Can Bas – in exchange for mills and water on the river Bitlles. The buyer of the vineyard is the son of the viscount of Barcelona. The viscount is interested in populating this frontier region between the Catalan counties and the Saracen domains of Al-Andalus. The imposing shadow of the castle of Subirats defends this part of the Hispanic March.
Down on the plain, the peasants plough, fertilise, glean, sow, thresh, grind, prune and pick. They work from dawn till dusk in the cornfields and the vineyards belonging to their noble lords. We are now in the feudal period. At that time Can Bas was just a small tenant farm known as the house of Sant Joan Salerm. Around it villages, fairs and markets are springing up and fine buildings are being constructed.
1350-1500
Twilight and rebirth
The good times and prosperity have come to an end. Now is a time of hunger, and of plague too. There are fewer and fewer hands to work and more and more abandoned farmhouses. With nowhere to turn, suffocated by taxes and feudal injustice, the peasants rebel against their lords. In troubled times there are always some who use sense and wisdom to look after their own.
Around 1500 there are men arguing that the earth is not flat and moves around the sun, printers copying books and spreading knowledge at unheard-of speed, and also sailors who have circumnavigated the world. Around the year 1500, the hard work of farmers turns a small tenant farm into a family property known as Can Carbó de Sant Joan Salerm.