Euskara, The basque language

In the scriptoria of monasteries and the court, where the teachings of the Christian-Latin world were developed, Basque was considered to be a rusticum vocabulum (1045), a vernacular language. Most of the population, however, lived in a monolingual Basquespeaking universe. In 924, the Moorish chronicler, Al-Himyari, spoke of a land of high mountains and deep valleys, inhabited by poor, underfed people who spoke Basque (bashkunis) which made the impossible to understand.

The borders of the kingdom with the Moors and the Franks were consolidated around 905 AD. The kingdom of Navarre, most of
whose subjects spoke Basque, reached its zenith around the year 1,000. Sancho III (Sancho the Great) (1000-1035) reigned above all south of the Pyrenees, from Burgos and present-day Cantabria to Aragon.

Sancho III (Sancho the Great) (reigned 1000-1035), controlled the territories of Burgos, Rioja, Navarre, Gipuzkoa and Biscay (Bizkaia), which also included today's Alava. In 1157, King García V of Navarre, (García the Restorer), re-established Navarre's independence after 58 years of union with the kingdom of Aragon. Ten years later, in a document signed by the King of Pamplona Sancho VI (Sancho the Wise), Basque is referred to as the lingua navarrorum (the language of the Navarrese). In the monolingual Christian Vasconia, the majority language was Basque, although scribes and the élite classes used Latin and later the Romance languages. In the eleventh century, a monk from San Millán de La Cogolla annotated the Glosas Emilianenses (Emilianian Glosses) in Basque.

Information on medieval Basque is scarce and incomplete, coming mostly from the names of places and people, as well as a
few words (such as the legal terms used in the General Charter of Liberties of Navarre) and some short phrases.

The few documented examples of medieval Basque, between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, are found mostly in monastic
sources. In 1239, Ferdinand III of Castile (Saint Ferdinand) gave the citizens of Ojacastro (Rioja) permission to speak Basque. In 1385, in the tax registry of Bearne, many houses in the Saison or Uhaitz valley are recorded with one name in Gascon and another in Basque. In 1415, an official from the Royal Treasury of Pamplona and another from Donibane Garazi (Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port) corresponded in Basque.