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The assaults and aggressions that road and trail users suffered from alleged bandits and outlaws have been a historical constant. As a result, the social perception of the bandit as a road robber. However, one might ask: To what extent is this image true and accurate? Was this always indiscriminate and fortuitous violence exercised by simple robbers and the ragged? Or, on the contrary, was there some premeditation? Did the assailants know, or not, the identity of their victim? Were the aggressor and the victim part of a faction or not? In this paper, I analyze a case of assault and aggression that occurred in 1536 on the royal road, near Carcaixent, a small village in the Kingdom of Valencia (Crown of Aragon). On that occasion, the Cosme brothers, Damià and Vicent Colomer, inhabitants of the present day Valldigna, assaulted the farmer Bertomeu Garrigues, stealing some of his belongings and causing serious injuries. What looks as a paradigmatic case of assault and aggression on the road by common criminals, proves to be a much more complex case when we go deeper into the identity and life trajectories of the protagonists and their respective families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the process of revitalisation of Diplomatic there is an area that has hardly been dealt with, although it is known and studied from other perspectives. It is the set of gestures and signs that used to be reflected some documentary typologies, rarely analysed in relation to the document itself, to which they are associated: touching with the hands, the ceremonial of taking possession; some relevant signs, such as the key, the book or the tree; privileged spaces; cutting the document to indicate multiple originals or their cancellation, and the materiality of the details. In this paper we seek to examine some of these gestures in the medieval documentation of the kingdom of Valencia. The reading of these gestures, together with the documents they accompany, allows us to improve the understanding of the meaning of the document in a specific society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]