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These absences may all be coincidental but I suspect instead that they [ 146 ] reflect a serious opposition to Alfonso VI in powerful court circles . If he were willing to make some minor concession to Henry and Teresa in order to soften the blow constituted by his decision on the succession question , these were not to be found in the realm of high ecclesiastical appointments . The less social could always resort to dicing and board games , including even chess for the truly sophisticated of the highest circles . The size of the court , as we envision it , also suggests that six more carts and carters must be added for dry provisions . As was his preferred practice , Alfonso expected his allies to defray the costs of his campaign . All of these events demonstrate clearly that the Leonese monarch [ 361 ] continued until his death to regard the control of appointments to the episcopate of the realm as an indispensable prop of the royal authority . The society of the medieval west understood the many kinds of power but it invariably turned from them eventually to the only source of proper authority it could conceive . One must conceive cooks , grooms , drovers , and carters spreading over the countryside about their essential tasks of replenishment , sometimes paying and sometimes not , but in any event leaving the scant surpluses of eleventh-century larders and flocks sadly depleted and their owners contemplating with dismay the endless time before the next harvest , the next vintage , or the next foaling .