Evil customs

"Bad uses", "Bad customs", "Mals usos", and "Malos usos" redirect here.

Evil customs (Catalan: mals usos, lit. "bad uses") were a set of specific Medieval feudal customs, generally levies, which peasants were subjected to by their feudal lords in the Kingdom of Aragon and in other European countries. These obligations are related to the Ius Maletractandi, a right approved by the Catalan Court of 1358 () in 1202, which empowered the feudal lords to mistreat, imprison and dispossess peasants of their property.

As time went on during the High Middle Ages, with the gradual reestablishment of Roman law evil customs began to be viewed as abuses. However, due to the crisis of the Late Middle Ages, many nobles experienced a drop in income and in their standard of living. The "manorial reaction" reestablished the evil customs even more strictly in order to increase their revenues, which caused major rebellions.

In the Principality of Catalonia, the population was controlled by the feudal nobility and a concrete number of benefits were established that would later be considered evil customs. The customs were most often found in relation to the lands of the so-called Old Catalonia. The submission of the peasant to the land he worked required him to pay a redemption if he wanted to leave it.

The Usages of Barcelona collected only three of the most common obligations, the intestia, cugucia and eixorquia.The evil customs with the possibility of being redeemed paying a tribute to the lord in the Sentencia Arbitral de Guadalupe, are:

In addition to these evil customs, other manorial customs existed, including:

The evil customs were one of the causes of the Catalan Civil War, which took place between the years 1460 and 1486, the year in which they were abolished by king Ferdinand II of Aragon. He issued the Sentencia Arbitral de Guadalupe, which redeemed the evil customs with a previous payment of 60 salaries per farm, and abolished the right to mistreat and many other minor landed abuses. The peasants maintained the useful domain of the farms, but they had to pay homage to the feudal lord and pay the feudal rights.

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