CURTENSE, SISTEMA. — This is the medieval economic and administrative system that governed the curtes, consisting of a territorial estate and the whole of the buildings and persons connected with it; these rose to the status of juridical entities with distinctive rights. The most numerous of these entities were the royal ones (villae, or private properties) and the ecclesiastical and monastic ones.
As regards the economic aspect, the curtense system regulated the position of the individual categories of persons dependent on the court (coloni, artisans, etc.), with their respective rights and duties and the specific services they were required to render to the dominant estate. From the administrative standpoint, the courts enjoyed special treatment and a certain autonomy: they depended upon a single head, with officials assigned to various offices (custodes chartarum, ecclesiae, panis, vinearum...), according to the size and importance of the courts; this autonomy was increased by particular tax and even judicial immunities, initially limited to the royal courts, and later, toward the middle of the 9th century, extended also to the ecclesiastical and monastic courts.
As for their origin, today there is a tendency to regard them as a derivative of the regime of the Roman latifundia. The diffusion of these institutions encompassed the whole of Latin Europe, as is shown by the names retained by many localities in Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, Germany, etc., formed with the word «corte»... (Cour, Cortes, and, in German, with the suffixes -hof, -hofen, -huben).