Old Catalonia

Old Catalonia (Catalan: Catalunya Vella) was a legal concept created by Catalan jurist Pere Albert [ca] in the second quarter of the thirteenth century to refer to the territories of Catalonia containing remensa peasants from the Diocese of Girona, the eastern half of the Diocese of Vic and the portion of the Archdiocese of Barcelona east of the Llobregat river.

In the 9th and 10th centuries these territories, like all of ancient Gothia [ca; fr; es] or Marca Hispanica had been an area of relative freedom for the peasants.

At the end of the thirteenth century, jurist and Canon Pere Albert wrote his Commemorations [ca], a treatise on customary law that collected in one place all the procedures and customs currently in force in Catalonia.

To fill in this gap, and merely for geographic purposes, historians such as Pere Gil created the name "Catalunya Novísima" (Very New Catalonia) to refer to the five counties.

The circumstance is that part of Old Catalonia roughly corresponds to the dialectal area of central Catalan, which extends as far south as the plain of Tarragona.