5 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. by This measure of 1602 was the first of a long series of increasingly frantic endeavors on the part of the Mesta to secure, 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 ally, though a far from effective one. Judged by the formal Mesta privileges of the time, the first third of the seventeenth century was the zenith of that organization's power, with the climax reached in the sweeping concession of 1633.1 The mass of material, however, introduced in the sixteenth-century litigations cited above, gives ample evidence that the prestige of the Mesta and its entregadores was on the wane long before the death of Philip II in 1598. The attempts of the crown after that time to revive the Mesta's power as an asset to the country, and particularly to the royal treasury, were more and more obviously selfish efforts to gain immediate profits regardless of any ultimate improvement in the welfare of the realm. The Cortes, ever eloquent in the interest of the towns and of the scattered landowning classes, became steadily stronger in their contest with the Mesta and its judges. In 1600 they began the practice of appointing committees to investigate charges brought against individual entregadores. The deputies thus took over a function which had long since been the acknowledged right of the President of the Mesta and his associates in the Royal Council. This was followed up by more elaborate arrangements for the supervision and control of the meetings of the Mesta through highly paid and specially commissioned delegates, who were named by the Cortes shortly before each meeting of the sheep owners. These appointees made full reports and recommendations to the national assembly at each session of that body.* of all such profits. Within a few years this had become a fixed sum, which, with other royal incomes from the Mesta, amounted to about 1,700,000 maravedis annually. The Mesta received the remaining two-thirds, which it shared, in the case of penalties for enclosures, with the entregadores. Those officers had been receiving a fixed salary of 500 ducats a year, during the latter part of the sixteenth century, as a substitute for the irregular income from shares in many fines. In 1688 this figure was cut to 300 ducats, but was raised to 400 two years later, at which it was kept until the abolition of the office in 1796. Quad. 1731, pt. 2, p. 288; Nov. Recop., lib. 7, tit. 27, ley 5, cap. 32. 1 Usually bound with the 1639 edition of the Mesta laws; see below, p. 413. * The procuradores, or deputies, from Soria and Segovia usually defended the cause of the Mesta in the Cortes debates. * Cortes de Castilla, xix, p. 561 (1600); xxvii, p. 241 (1612); xxxiii, p. 215 (1619). ♦ Ibid., xix, pp. 121, 525, 537, 659 (1600); xx, pp. 157, 264, 377, 547 (1602). The rigors of this campaign drew frequent protestations of innocence from the Mesta, and pleas that its entregadores be allowed to perform their ancient duties in protecting the welfare of the herdsmen, which had always been the first need of this, the greatest industry of the country. Its bid for crown favors with the new grants to the royal exchequer from entregadores' profits, introduced in 1602, had secured a few liberal renewals of the old privileges, the most extreme being that of 1633. However, these concessions were only powerful on paper, whereas the Cortes, though sadly lacking in constructive ability, were thoroughly active, and awake to their own power to overturn. The determined hostility of the deputies, which was displayed in the debates on the question of Mesta reform, and the proposals which the Cortes were entertaining for the drastic investigation of that body and its affairs, so startled the sheep owners that they held no meetings in 1603. This was the only gap in the long series of Mesta sessions for over three centuries. A few years later the Cortes sent to Simancas for certain documents bearing on the Mesta, and, shortly afterward, shrewd attorneys of the herdsmen secured a writ from the Royal Council and the king, authorizing the transfer of all documents in the archives at Simancas dealing with the Mesta to the latter's own collection. Here they were carefully guarded for three hundred years, untouched save for purposes of litigation in defence of the ancient privileges of the herdsmen. Another aspect of the aggressive intentions of the Cortes toward the Mesta was revealed when the former refused to grant concessions to the pastoral industry except in exchange for modifications of the subsidies to be paid to the crown by the cities of the realm. Such subsidies were to be voted only in conjunction 1 Cortes de Castilla, xx, pp. 615-616 (1602). The titles of the documents removed at that time fill seventeen manuscript volumes, now in the Mesta archive, and comprise about three thousand items. This accounts for the fact that, with the exception of a small collection of documents on taxes, there are less than half a dozen manuscripts now at Simancas which deal at any length with the Mesta. with stipulated restrictions on the Mesta. A series of conferences was begun, in 1602, between commissioners representing the Cortes and the sheep owners, to agree upon the agrarian reforms which were to be embodied in the condiciones de millones. Under those conditions the Cortes gave its consent to an extraordinary subsidy of eighteen million ducats to the crown. Practically the only references to the Mesta in the Cortes debates from that date onward were in connection with this subsidy or later ones of the same type. During the later Middle Ages the Castilian Cortes had by no means so effective a control over the crown through its powers over the purse strings as did the Aragonese parliament." Under the enfeebled monarchy of the later Hapsburgs, however, the ability of the Castilian deputies to exact desired reforms as conditions for subsidies is well illustrated by the sad experience of the Mesta. The conditions of the grants of millones were fully discussed and reported upon by a board of arbitrators and commissioners named by both sides. To this body the Mesta sent frequent petitions, characterized by the same humility which marked all of its communications to the Cortes at this time." At the first of these conferences, in 1602, the representatives of the Cortes made it plain that they proposed to secure every possible curtailment of such powers as still remained to the entregadores. The same policy was pursued at each of the succeeding conferences in 1607, 1611, 1620, and after. As a result the Mesta 1 Cortes de Castilla, xxi, pp. 45-48; see Escrituras, acuerdos, administraciones, y suplicas de los servicios de veinte y quatro millones (Madrid, 1734), which contains condiciones attached to various millones voted during the seventeenth century. Cf. Quad. 1731, pt. 1, pp. 239 ff. Cos-Gayon, in his article on the Mesta in the Revista de España, ix, p. 358, erroneously describes the millones as being in reales, instead of ducados; cf. Gallardo, Rentas Reales, i, p. 47. The millones were first voted in the Cortes of 1588, as a source of revenue for the equipment of the Invincible Armada. They were usually granted at six-year intervals, and the funds were raised by taxes on such staples as oil, vinegar, meat, wine, etc. An excellent unpublished history of the millones by Antonio de Castro exists in the Acad. Hist., Ms. Salazar 41, no. 7 (ca. 1656). * Cf. R. B. Merriman, "The Cortes of the Spanish Kingdoms in the Later Middle Ages," in the American Historical Review, April, 1911, p. 489. • Cortes de Castilla, xxii, pp. 26–32, 54–56, 69, 76, 95 (1603); xxiii, pp. 514-515, 524 (1607); xxiv, pp. 284, 785-789 (1608); xxv, pp. 42, 51–55, 660 (1609-10). • Escrituras, acuerdos. . . de Millones, fols. 34-44. representatives were forced to sit meekly by and endorse what amounted to the complete emasculation of their nearly impotent itinerant justices. Without the Cortes' vote of the millones the crown was in dire straits; and without the crown's effective assistance, the Mesta was helpless. The Cortes thus adroitly secured the upper hand by its control of the subsidy, and it proceeded at once to dismantle the last antiquated bits of the entregador's armor. Any attempt on his part to hold court outside a few specified places was to be punished by a fine of 20,000 maravedis. He was to hear no cases involving enclosures, except in a few unimportant instances. If he assessed costs of litigation in any case when the Mesta was the plaintiff, he was to lose his office. As a final blow he was forbidden to retain any part of such fines as he might levy - a measure which, of course, obliterated practically all of his income. The condiciones de millones thus inaugurated the first formal obsequies for the prestige of the entregador. In the meantime, in its regular sessions, the Cortes calmly took it upon themselves to determine what salary the entregador should be paid, how large a staff he should have, and other details regarding the regulation of the office.1 In. 1608 the legislature voted that the sedentary flocks (estantes) were in no way to be subject to or affected by entregador decisions.2 Petitions from the Mesta, asking that the entregadores be at least partially relieved from the vexations of local officials, were at first dismissed by the Cortes with the reply that they saw no reason why such a request should be made.' Later it was agreed that the royal corregidor in a given district should hold court jointly with the entregador. This insured a measure of protection to the Mesta against local officers, for the corregidores were chosen by the central government for their intelligence and legal training, which often proved useful to the entregadores in the interpretation of local fueros and ordinances. At the same time careful 1 Cortes de Castilla, xxv, pp. 47–55 (1609). ? Cárdenas, Propiedad territorial (Madrid, 1873–75, 2 vols.), ii, p. 277. ' Cortes de Castilla, xxv, p. 47; xxviii, pp. 396-398 (1615). ♦ Ibid., xxxii, p. 195 (1618). See above, p. 84, on the coöperation between corregidor and entregador as early as 1488. These were all steps which led ulti |