1

Council, or to the chancillerías, which were at that time well under the control of the monarch and his council. The crown treated this petition with the same impatience and disregard which characterized the royal replies to the many previous requests of the assembly for Mesta reforms. By an interesting coincidence, the year after this attempt by the Cortes to thwart the chancillerías, namely 1533, brought the first decisions of a chancillería against an entregador and the Mesta. In that year the towns of Belalcázar and Fuerte Escusa (near Cuenca) won appeals in the chancillería at Granada, in cases involving the taxation of migratory flocks which violated local ordinances regarding trespasses in fields adjoining the cañadas. A few years later, in 1546, the same court again rendered a decision hostile to the Mesta and its judiciary. On that occasion the chancellería supported a local officer, the subordinate of the corregidor in the town of Ávila, in his contention that the entregador had no right to interfere with him.3 In the meantime, the city of Murcia had gained a chancillería verdict against an entregador, and the court at Valladolid had refused the Mesta and its judges permission to lay out a new cañada within the jurisdiction of Segovia. Shortly before the accession of Philip II, there came another decision of the Granada court against the Mesta, but this was altered at a rehearing.5

The above instances are given as illustrations of a significant change which was just becoming noticeable in the attitude of the two chancillerías. Throughout the reign of Charles V these high courts were handing down six or seven decisions each year on

1 Cortes, Segovia, 1532, pet. 53. This was repeated in 1537 (pet. 29) and in 1538 (pet. 81), with the same result. Nov. Recop., lib. 7, tit. 27, ley 5, cap. 14, enforces this restriction of appeals from entregadores to the chancillerías, instead of to the local bodies.

2 Arch. Osuna, Béjar, caj. 6, nos. 53, 59; and Arch. Mesta, F-2, Fuerte Escusa, 1533.

Arch. Mesta, A−9, Ávila, 1546.

♦ Ibid., S-5, Segovia, 1537. This case is further interesting because it is one of the few occasions when the chancillería acts as a court of first instance instead of appeal. Others are to be found in C-2, Camarena, 1523; F-2, Fuente el Sauco, 1511; F-2, Fuerte Escusa, 1533; G-1, Granada, 1547; M-2, Majambrez (Toledo), 1543; T-4, Toro, 1524; and Z-1, Zaias, 1519-24.

• Arch. Mesta, A−7, Almodóvar, 1559: a case tried during 1555-56.

appeals from the sentences of entregadores. During the latter half of the reign beginning about 1535- this change in the attitude of the chancillerías gradually become apparent. Whereas the earlier decades of the century showed them to be quite subservient to the wishes of the crown and its council in favoring the Mesta by regularly upholding the sentences of the entregadores, none of the later years passed without one or two decisions which were either complete reversals of the sentences of entregadores, or else serious modifications of them. Year by year the rulings against the entregadores grew in number. By the opening of the reign of Philip II, it was becoming evident to the antagonists of the Mesta that a method had at last been found for securing a fair hearing of their cause.

The chancillerías, probably because of their isolation from the newly made capital,1 became bolder each year in their refusal to abide by the expressed desires of the Royal Council that the ancient privileges of the Mesta and the increasingly arbitrary sentences of the entregadores be invariably upheld. We have here the beginning of the rivalry between these two elements of the government, the executive and the judiciary, the Council and the high courts - a rivalry which was to last nearly two centuries and was to take on many different forms.2 This new alignment of forces was of the gravest importance for the Mesta, which was thenceforth to see the Council, its staunch ally and protector, checked and harassed at every turn by the new sponsor of local as contrasted with centralized interests. The court at Granada was the one to which most of the appeals from entregador decisions were carried by the towns, because its jurisdiction comprised most of the southern pasture lands.

The heavy costs of fighting an appeal against the elaborate legal machinery of the Mesta made the procedure impossible for any save the more important landowners, military orders, great nobles, cities, and ecclesiastical bodies. For the smaller villages there was at first no recourse from the molestations of the entre

1 Madrid was made the 'única corte' in 1560.

2 José Gómez Centurión, Jovellanos y las órdenes Militares (1912), pp. 28-32, points out other phases of this rivalry.

gadores. The increased activity of these magistrates, however, at last impelled the weaker opponents of the Mesta to concerted action. Before the reign of Philip II was half over, we find them occasionally forming alliances for the purpose of carrying appeals through the chancillerías. As many as forty-five or fifty towns sometimes joined forces to defend the pasture lands used in common by them. Counsel was engaged and cases were fought out successfully in the high courts. Had these temporary unions possessed that solid, permanent basis so characteristic of the Aragonese comunidades, to which in some respects they were strikingly similar, the history of the Mesta and its entregadores would probably have been a much shorter and less conspicuous one. Unfortunately, however, the Castilian towns, accustomed though they were to their hermandades or brotherhoods for the maintenance of order, were nevertheless quite ignorant of the possible advantages of any economic leagues, save in a few isolated instances. The contrast between the two kingdoms in this regard is explained in part by the relatively stronger position of the cities in the Aragonese political machinery.

As the chancillerías persisted in their intentions to give the landowners at least a fair hearing, the Royal Council found it increasingly necessary to act in behalf of the Mesta and the entregador. As early as 1550 the Council had deemed it necessary to warn these two courts that they were not empowered to hear cases concerning perpetual leases of pasture lands. A few years later, in 1561 and 1563, two more decrees were issued forbidding the chancillerías to hear appeals from entregador decisions in cases involving pasturage.2

The two high courts had become bolder in their aggressive attitude toward the entregadores, and had begun to go beyond the mere reversal of the decisions of the Mesta judges. They frequently issued injunctions commanding the itinerant magistrates not to hear cases in certain towns and upon certain subjects. Repetitions of such mandates brought forth two angry decrees from Madrid in 1569, ordering the courts at Valladolid and

1 See above, p. 99.

2 Quad. 1731, pt. 1, pp. 124-125: pt. 2, p. 242.

Granada to keep to the functions assigned them and not to interfere with the management of such purely administrative affairs as those of the Mesta.1

The now thoroughly independent attitude of the courts soon found expression in even more aggressive steps, such as the exercise of jurisdiction over appeals from decrees of the President of the Mesta. The latter innovation brought forth a vehement protest from the crown against this "gross interference with the purely executive powers of the Royal Council's senior member." 2 In 1577 the Council made an unsuccessful attempt to curb the court at Granada by ordering it to refrain from tampering with any entregador's decision involving such administrative functions of the Council as the regulation of pasturage and of sheep highways. Two years later came another decree which forbade the courts to interfere with the entregadores in the hearing of cases on the extension of arable lands.4

It is hardly necessary to follow further the details of the struggle. By the time that the troubled reign of Philip II had come to a close in 1598, every decision handed down by the high courts at Valladolid and Granada regarding the Mesta showed the bitterest hostility toward the entregadores. The whole episode is of especial interest as an illustration of the strength of popular government in Castile in an age of supposedly triumphant autocracy. The Cortes and the chancillerías were defending the ancient rights of the Castilian third estate - the townsmen and the rural population-in the face of the institutions of absolutism - the Mesta and its corps of entregadores.

1 Arch. Mesta, V-1, Valladolid, 1569; G-1, Granada, 1569.

2 Ibid., Granada, 1572.

• Ibid., 1577.

Ibid., 1579. Some of the above decrees are printed in the Ordenanzas de la Chancilleria de Granada (1601) and Recopilación de las Ordenanzas de la Chancillería de Valladolid (1765). See also Nov. Recop., lib. 7, tit. 27, ley 5, caps.

22, 27.

CHAPTER VII

DECLINE OF THE ENTREGADOR

Hostility of the Cortes in the seventeenth century. Appeals to the chancillerías. Inefficacy of royal aid to the Mesta. Collapse of the entregador system in the eighteenth century.

THE Mesta, working through its President and the Royal Council, continued its attempts to hold back the steadily rising tide of opposition. These efforts, continued through the first decades of the seventeenth century, were all centred around one object, the maintenance of the ancient traditions of the judicial and administrative supremacy of the crown and its Council, especially in matters concerning the Mesta.

The crown itself, to which the sheep owners had been so largely indebted for their great privileges in times past, had degenerated almost to impotence. The impecunious later Hapsburgs were quite as ready to dicker with the opponents of the Mesta for subsidies, as they were to bargain for 'loans' from a scarcely solvent organization whose chief asset in such bartering was its protestation of past loyalty to the crown. In 1602, by a fundamental revision of the entregador commissions, the king's share in the profits of that office was greatly increased. This was obviously an effort on the part of the Mesta to secure a revival of its old favors from the crown. Even more was it intended to give warning of the losses which the royal exchequer would suffer if the rapidly increasing opposition to the Mesta in the Cortes and the chancillerías was not stopped.

This measure of 1602 was the first of a long series of increasingly frantic endeavors on the part of the Mesta to secure, by royal favors, a continuance of the dominant position which it had long enjoyed under its ancient but now quite antiquated privileges. The dire financial straits of the crown made it a willing

1 The confusion of this question of the distribution of the profits from the office of entregador was finally cleared up, after considerable legislation, by the acuerdos (resolutions) of the Mesta in 1637 and 1644, by which the king was given one-third