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were incorporated into the later codes of the national body,' and this resulted inevitably in serious friction and confusion.

As the national Mesta grew in strength and importance it undertook to assert claims upon all stray sheep in the realm, since these animals were, according to the local fueros themselves; mesteños and therefore under the jurisdiction of the Mesta. In other words, the national organization calmly ignored the fact that it had preempted the name of the older local pastoral associations; it undertook to capitalize that name wherever and whenever expediency required. It appointed officers called alcaldes de Mesta, alcaldes de corral, or alcaldes de quadrilla to serve in various quadrillas or districts with jurisdiction over all strays found in the migratory herds. These officers occupied themselves, during the earlier centuries of the Mesta, particularly with the enforcement of laws regarding branding, and the punishments for altering brands so as to facilitate the disposal of mesteños. Where the local flocks were sedentary; no difficulties developed; the officers of the town mestas disposed of their local strays, and the alcaldes of the national Mesta, until they became arrogant and ambitious under the patronage of the sixteenth-century autocrats, were interested only in the mesteños of the migrants. During the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, however, the local sedentary pastoral industry began more and more to assume important proportions. The local flocks, as we shall see later, undertook limited overnight migrations beyond the riberas or borders of the town jurisdiction, and the strays from these riberiegos soon attracted the attention of the Mesta officials.

1 See below, pp 55, 74, 75.

2 See below, p. 55. In the sixteenth century the number of such alcaldes was greatly increased and each was given a district of ten square leagues. Their functions were similar to those of the 'hog reeves' of colonial New England. The custodian or pound keeper in actual charge of the strays was called the

reusero.

• Early laws on branding are found in the Fuero Juzgo, lib. 8, tit. 5, ley 8, and Quad. 1731, pt. 2, tit. 20, ley 1.

It was commonly the practice for a town to grant as a concession the right to dispose of all mostrencos within its jurisdiction. Abraham el Barchilon held such a concession in Burgos in 1287: Arch. Ayunt. Burgos, Ms. 242. See below, Appendix C, for the text of a mostrenco concession, dated 1304.

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Previous to the reign of the Catholic Kings the disposal of mesteños or mostrencos had not caused any serious difficulty. The officials of the towns and of the Mesta handled those of their respective flocks, sedentary and migratory. Occasionally, however, royal officials disposed of unclaimed stray animals, on the theory that the king as lord of the whole realm had title to all ownerless property. On a similar basis, the lords of various towns laid claim to all or part of the local mostrencos as one of their seigniorial privileges. The marked increase of the pastoral industry during the first half of the sixteenth century, the growing importance of the Mesta, and the new claims to mostrencos advanced by the increasingly powerful church element all served to make 'this question of the disposal of mostrencos one of the difficult problems of the pastoral industry at that time.

2

The accounts of the Mesta after about 1525 show steadily growing returns from the farming out of mostrenco privileges in various districts. During the reign of Charles V the incomes from this source contributed largely to the affluence of the Mesta treasury in that period. But the penury and weakening administrative powers of later monarchs gave various rivals of the Mesta an opportunity to obtain titles to stray animals in different parts of the country. The towns, military orders, and nobles began to reassert their claims to local mostrencos, of which they had been deprived by the avidity of the Mesta during the earlier decades of the century. The most formidable of its rivals was the church,

1 Bib. Nac. Madrid, Ms. 13126: a grant of the mostrencos of Burgos by the crown to certain royal creditors (1287). Cortes, Toro, 1371, pet. 17: protests regarding the disposal of the mostrencos by royal officers. Cf. Jordana, Voces Forestales, p. 186.

* Arch. Osuna, Mss. Béjar, caj. 6, no. 52; caj. 9, nos. 61, 63: royal recognition of the title of the Dukes of Béjar to all mostrencos on their estates. Ibid., Mss. Infantazgo, caj. 3, leg. 2, no. 19, and leg. 5, nos 7, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25: a series of fifteenth and sixteenth century agreements between the Mesta and the Dukes of Infantazgo, by which the latter received a third of the proceeds from the sale of mostrencos on the ducal estates and the Mesta two thirds.

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See below, pp. 284-285.

Arch. Burgos, Ms. 4332, and Arch. Hist. Nac., Calatrava Mss. Reales 341: royal orders of 1580 ff. confirming claims to mostrencos in spite of protests from the Mesta. Concordia de 1783, ii, fols. 65-82: summaries of a series of royal decrees, mostly of the period 1561-99, assigning sedentary mostrencos to local authorities and restricting the Mesta's authority to strays of the migratory flocks.

which had been granted title to certain mostrencos by the Catholic Kings in 1484, 1496, and 1502 as a means of assisting the fund of the cruzada, the propaganda work for the Faith against the Moors and the pagans of the New World.' The Mesta fought this concession vigorously, but without success; in fact, the campaigns of the devout Philip II against Turks, Protestants, and American pagans resulted in further concessions of mostrenco rights to the church and corresponding losses to the Mesta. By the middle of the seventeenth century there remained for the latter only the right to such stray animals as were actually in the migrating flocks at the time of the semiannual meetings. The ancient right of local mestas to deal with mostrencos, which had gradually been encroached upon and absorbed by the national Mesta, was thus taken from that body and returned to town mestas, churches, and other local bodies.

These were, then, the successive episodes or elements out of which the Mesta emerged and from which it drew inspiration: the migratory sheep industry of Iberian and Visigothic times, the sheep and the pastoral customs of the Berber invaders, and lastly the mediaeval town mestas, or gatherings of shepherds to dispose of stray animals. Each of these factors contributed toward the origin of the Castilian Mesta in the latter half of the thirteenth century, and had a fundamental influence upon its character and later history.

The course of that history and the importance of the Mesta may best be studied under two general headings: first, the internal organization of that body; and secondly, its external rela

1 Solórzano, Política Indiana, bk. iv, cap. 25. The decree of 1484 gave to the commissioners of the cruzada' a fifth of all mostrencos, incomes from bull fights, and properties of persons dying intestate. Ulloa, Privs. Cáceres, pp. 308–311.

Arch. Mesta, Prov. i, 107, contains a series of documents, 1496–1640, on the conflict over the mostrencos. The claims of the church are set forth in Concordia de 1783, ii, fol. 70. The introduction into America of these ecclesiastical titles to mostrencos is illustrated in a representation of the bishop of Linares on the subject, from the Archivo del Gobierno de Saltillo, prov. Texas, no. 370 (1784), a copy of which is in the library of Professor H. E. Bolton, Berkeley, California. The laws regarding the disposal of mostrencos in the eighteenth century are found in a printed folder in Brit. Mus. 8228. l. 13, i, fols. 345-352, and iii, fols. 137-149.

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tions with the crown and with landowners, both private and public. The first of these headings, the internal affairs of the Mesta, will require an examination of the practices connected with the sheep migrations, the use of sheep highways, the organization of the flocks, the marketing methods employed in disposing of the wool, and the constitution of the Mesta itself, its officials and their duties. The second, the external relations of the organization, will involve a group of three problems-judicial, fiscal, and agrarian-which reflect the position of the Mesta in Spanish history and throw light upon the real significance of its long annals as an illustration of the ancient and universal conflict between herdsman and husbandman.

CHAPTER II

MIGRATIONS

Sheep highways in Mediterranean countries. The Castilian cañadas. Traffic routes of the Teamsters' Gild of Castile. Organization and size of the Mesta flocks. On the march. Wool clipping.

THE first feature to be noted with reference to the general organization of the migratory pastoral industry in Castile is the system of special highways for the use of the flocks. These sheep walks occur in all of the countries where the industry is found. Southern Italy was traversed by the early Roman calles and their successors, the tratturi.1 In Provence, Algeria, and the Balkans there were similar routes-some of them probably pre-Romanreserved for the wandering flocks. In the Spanish kingdoms these highways were known by different names: the cabañeras of Aragon, the carreradas of Catalonia, the azadores reales of Valencia, and, most important of all from the present point of view, the cañadas of Castile."

The antiquity of the sheep walks in Castile is a question which has caused much discussion. It has been contended that the curious framontanos (pre-Roman stone images of pigs, rams, and bulls) found in many parts of central Spain marked the routes of certain Iberian sheep highways, which were later followed by

1 See below, p. 69.

"Les

* Densusianu, Pastoritul la Popoarele Romanice (Bucharest, 1913); E. de Martonne, “La vie pastorale et la transhumance dans les Karpates méridionales," in Zu Friedrich Ratzels Gedächtnis (Leipsic, 1904), pp. 225-245; Fournier, chemins de transhumance en Provence et in Dauphiné,” in Bull. de géog. hisl, et descrip., 1900, pp. 237-262; Cabannes, "Les chemins de transhumance dans le Couserans," ibid., 1899, pp. 185-200; Bernard and Lacroix, L'Evolution du nomadisme en Algérie (Paris, 1906), p. 69.

* In some parts of Castile these routes were called galianas, cordones, cuerdos, and cabañiles. The cañadas were sometimes merely local sheep walks, running but a short distance into the suburbs, but this use of the name was unusual. Ordenanzas de Lorca (Granada, 1713), p. 29 (in Berlin Kgl. Bibl., no. 5725); Acad. Hist., Sempere Ms. B. 125, no. 17.

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