CHAPTER IV

INTERNAL ORGANIZATION OF THE MESTA

Ordinances. Meetings. Elections. Membership. The President and other officers. Legal staff. Fiscal agents. Shepherds; their duties and privileges. Proportion of large and small owners.

Two characteristics were typical of Spanish political machinery during the Middle Ages, namely, its democracy, and the scrupulous attention of its codes and ordinances to the minutest administrative details. Both of these features stand out conspicuously in the constitution of the Mesta; in fact, they give that institution much of the interest which it has for the student of Spanish constitutional history.

The internal organization of the Mesta - its meetings, its membership, and its staff of officers -- was prescribed in the ordinances which were codified in 1492 by Malpartida, the able legal expert of Ferdinand and Isabella. There were earlier compilations of Mesta laws, such as that of 1379, but these have not been preserved. The code of 1492 was supplemented by one drawn up in 1511 by Palacios Rubios, second president of the Mesta (1510-22), and, like Malpartida, a famous councillor of Ferdinand and Isabella. These ordinances of 1492 and 1511 summarized the constitutional practices which had been observed by the Mesta for centuries: the procedure of its meetings, the qualifications and functions of its officials, and the obligations and privileges of its members. Let us proceed, then, to an examination of these various details.

In the earlier centuries of the Mesta's history, the sheep owners were accustomed to hold three annual meetings. About 1500, however, these were reduced to two sessions, each of about twenty

1 Concordia de 1783, i, fols. 184 v-198.

• Francisco Hilario Bravo, Noticia sucinta del Origen de la Asociación (Madrid, 1849: 15 pp.), p. 15.

• Concordia de 1783, i, fols. 198–251. Palacios Rubios was conspicuous in the codification of the first laws regulating the trade and government of the colonies in America.

days' duration, one in the south, in January or February, and the other in the north, in September or October. During the years of waning prestige and of financial stringency, in the seventeenth century, the herdsmen frequently held only one annual meeting, and even that was once abandoned when the attacks of the Cortes deputies became unusually bitter. The places of meeting were designated, in turn, by each of the four centres or headquarters of the Mesta: Soria, Segovia, Cuenca, and León. The southern and southwestern towns in which the winter meetings usually assembled were Villanueva de la Serena, where the Mesta kept its archive in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Don Benito, Siruela, Guadalupe, Talavera, and Montalbán. In the northern mountains the customary meeting places were Aillon, Riaza, Aranda de Duero, Buitrago, Medina del Campo, Berlanga, and Siguenza. It was not until 1740 that Madrid became the usual place for both winter and summer meetings, though the Mesta archive had been transferred to that city about 1593. In the middle of the eighteenth century the voluminous bundles of the archive were transferred across the city from the church of San Martín to the edifice on the Calle de las Huertas in which · they are housed today.

The meetings were usually held in a church; but not infrequently they took place in the open fields, and for such occasions an ingeniously constructed collapsible and portable altar was carried. This contrivance and the accompanying silver service are still employed for the mass read before the annual meetings of the Mesta's successor, the Asociación General de Ganaderos del Reino. The quorum of the sessions was forty, and the actual attendance probably between two and three hundred. This was only about a tenth of the herdsmen who were entitled to attend, namely all who paid the royal tolls on migratory flocks. Women sheep owners were often present, and were given all the privileges of membership.

1 Arch. Mesta, Privs. Reales, leg. 1, no. 1 (1273); Paris Bib. Nat., Res. Oa. 198 ter no. 46 (1616). See also below, pp. 119, 289.

* See Map, p. 19. The meeting places from 1500 to 1827 are listed in Matlas Brieva, Colec de Ordenes pertenecientes al Ramo de Mesta, pp. viii-xxxi.

• Cf. p. 403.

In all things the votes of the body were taken by quadrillas or groups. These were the four units into which the sheep owners were districted around the leading pastoral centres of the northern uplands- Soria, Segovia, Cuenca, and León. The quadrilla of Soria included the bishoprics of Osuna, Burgos, Calahorra, Siguenza, and part of Tarazona. That of Cuenca comprised the bishopric of that city, and was later (1693) extended to include the regions of southern Aragon, around Albarracín and Teruel. The Segovian district was made up of the bishoprics of Segovia and Ávila, and of Valle de Lozoya, Real de Manzanares, and other adjoining localities of less importance. The León quadrilla included the bishoprics of León and Astorga. In these regions were the homes of the transhumantes and their owners, the Mesta members. At the Mesta sessions each quadrilla met separately, arrived at a decision upon every question to be brought before the entire organization, and then expressed its position at the general meeting through the quadrilla leader. The four leaders sat two on either side of the President, with the one from Soria in the position of honor at his right hand. Occasionally one or more of these quadrillas would take independent action without consulting the general body."

As is explained below, the right to vote in the quadrillas was not qualified by any specifications regarding ownership of flocks of a given size, as was the case with the historic sheep owners' gild of Saragossa. In spite of this liberality, however, the great sheep owners among the nobility were occasionally able to bring pressure to bear through the President of the organization, who

1 Bravo, Noticia sucinta, pp. 5–8. The royal privileges of 1273 and after made the Mesta ostensibly include "all sheep owners in the realm," as will be pointed out later. This attempt at universality did not, however, affect the fact stated above regarding the habitat of the migrants.

• Arch. Simancas, Mss. Diversos Castilla, no. 1643, is a carefully written opinion of some Mesta attorney in 1566, in which the local mesta of Soria (see above, pp. 9 ff.) is regarded as the model for the national Mesta. This may have been the reason for the precedence which Soria enjoyed over the other quadrillas.

Arch. Mesta, Prov. ii, 38: León in 1647 for certain favors.

a vote of a subsidy to the king by the quadrilla of Ibid., i, 21: measures taken by Segovia and León

in 1498 in order to secure special concessions for their flocks at the royal toll gates. • See p. 53.

was usually closely associated with them either in the Royal Council or at court. Nearly all elections were by lot, the common mediaeval Spanish practice of insaculación. For every post to be filled eight names were placed in the urn, two from each quadrilla, and the candidate whose name was drawn was compelled by law to accept the office. Bonds were required of all responsible officers, and each one had to submit to the residencia, or public examination of his official record at the close of his term of service.2

3

The most important dignitary of the Mesta, from the point of view of its internal organization, was the President. During the Middle Ages the presiding officer was probably the chief entregador or some royal notary, but in 1500 Ferdinand and Isabella created the Presidency of the Mesta and assigned the office to the eldest member of the Royal Council. His duties, besides the usual ones of a presiding officer, were to conduct all hearings of complaints against entregadores and Mesta officers, to supervise their work, and to fill any vacancies in certain lesser posts. In other words, he was not only in charge of the internal administration of the Mesta, but, because of his control over its itinerant protectors, the entregadores, he also dominated the relations between the herdsmen and the wayside husbandmen. Equally as important as these two functions was his position as the connecting link between the central government and the Mesta."

See below, p. 108.

1 See illustration opposite. The chief entregador is shown as the spokesman and presiding officer of the Mesta in Concordia de 1783, i, fols. 156 ff. (1379); Arch. Mesta, A-3, Alange, 1455; and M-1, Madrid, 1418.

'Bravo, Nolicia sucinta, says that certain members of the council had presided over the Mesta previous to 1500. This is true, since the chief entregador, who sometimes served in that capacity, was also a royal councillor (cf. p. 83); but there are no records of any 'President of the Mesta' before that year. Brieva, Colección de Ordenes, pp. viii-xxxi, gives a list of all Mesta presidents from 1500 to 1827. In the Paris Arch. Nationales, Collec. Tiran, is a list of the Mesta presidents of the period 1670-1772, with interesting comments.

Quad. 1731, pt. 1, pp. 209-221, contains the laws prescribing the duties of the office. Cf. Arch. Hist. Nac., Consejo Real, Expedientes, leg. 48. no. 3: an eighteenth-century review of the functions of the President. See also Martinez Salazar, Colección de Memorias... del Consejo (Madrid, 1764), pp 221-236, and Escolano de Arrieta, Práctica del Consejo Real (Madrid, 1796, 2 vols.), i, pp. 584-587.

1.CARANAREAL.

URN USED IN MESTA ELECTIONS

Now in the possession of the Asociación General de Ganaderos. The candidates' names were placed in the hollow balls one for each of the quadrillas—and these were then drawn from the urn, the old Spanish pra of election by lot, called insaculación (p. 52). One of the regular items in the account books of each session the nominal fee paid "to the boy who drew the lots." The urn dates from the late sixteenth or early sevente century, and is engraved with the coat of arms of the Mesta, which is also shown on the eighteenth-century tape in the background. One of the earliest examples of this escutcheon is on the first page of the charter of 1525 Frontispiece). The arms consist of the eagle of St. John the Evangelist (adapted from the arms of Ferdinand Isabeila; see seal on decree of January, 1488, p. 218), bearing a shield with the castle, lion, and pomegranate o Spanish arms (Castile, León, and Granada), and a ram and bull representing the Mesta.