the latter title until it was sold to the Mesta, in 1568, for 750,000 'maravedis.1 The entregador mayor derived his income from the office by farming out certain districts as itineraries to subordinate entregadores. Nevertheless the crown continued to keep in close touch with all such magistrates, even to the extent of occasionally naming them regardless of the prerogative of the entregador-in-chief. Such a royal nomination of an entregador for a particular district or route was usually made with the consent of the Mesta members of that section. The practice of consulting these members fell into disuse, however, as the central authority represented by the king and the titled proprietor of the entregadorship grew stronger. Finally, in 1419, when the Mesta endeavored to revive its old prerogative, the Carrillo and Acuña families, proprietors of the office at the time, readily secured a peremptory royal refusal to the sheep owners' petition. Thereafter the staff of entregadores, both chief and subordinates, was even more clearly defined as a corps of distinctly royal officers. The powerful nobles named above, who controlled the entregadores under John II and Henry IV, taking full advantage of the these officials from 1417 onward. On the Count of Buendía's appointment, see also Acad. Hist., Ms. E-127, fols. 183-185. There is a brief account of the historic Buendía family in the Boletin de la Sociedad Castellana de Excursiones (Valladolid, 1901 ff.), iii, p. 143. 1 Quad. 1731, pt. 2, p. 259. * Arch. Ayunt. Cuenca, Becerro, fols. 25-27: the royal letter of appointment of an entregador, dated September, 1300: los pastores de la cañada de Cuenca me enbiaron pedir merced que les diesse por mio alcalde y entregador en la cañada de Cuenca a Roy Ferrandez, cauallero de Cuenca, y yo touelo por bien . . y mando que oya las querellas que acaescieren entre los pastores y los de la tierra, y les faga las entregas. ." An appointment of 1308 is similarly worded. Arch. Hist. Nac., Calatrava Docs. Reales, iii, no. 165. In another of 1306, however (ibid., no. 163) there is no consent indicated on the part of any Mesta members. The latter document is further indicative of the crown's immediate control over the entregador by the delineation of the jurisdiction of the appointee ... en todas las cañadas, salue en las villas y lugares de la reyna mi rnadre." This exemption of the queen's lands was stipulated in most of the entregador appointments previous to the sixteenth century. There is also a notable concordia or agreement between the Mesta and Queen Leonora, dated 1423, on this subject. Arch. Mesta, P-6, Puebla de Montalbán, 1423. Arch. Mesta, S-5, Siguenza, 1792. weakness of the crown, had their tenure and jurisdiction secured by a series of letters patent which afforded them ample protection against the protests of local officials and even of the Mesta itself. They seem to have been particularly insistent upon the enforcement of the old requirement which brought all complaints against the entregadores before the king himself: a provision which, after all, was not without some reason, since the greater part of the protests arose from conflicting exemptions granted by the crown, on the one hand to the towns and on the other to the Mesta.1 In a word, the whole tendency of the time was steadily toward the concentration of the supervision of the Mesta in the hands of officers of the central government. The most significant step in this direction came in 1454, when the king appointed Pedro de Acuña, "my counsellor and chief guard, for many and good services rendered, to be the entregador mayor." By this appointment the chief entregador was made the means of communication between the crown and the Mesta, because of his dual status as personal adviser to the sovereign and director of the most important officials of the Mesta. Through him were conveyed the royal orders and grants of favors to that body. He protected the interests of the crown at all Mesta meetings, and brought to those semiannual functions a dignity and prestige which they had not previously enjoyed. From the Mesta's point of view, the designation of a member of the Royal Council as entregador-in-chief was most important. It meant that the herdsmen would have a representative constantly near the sovereign to plead their cause. The inauguration of this practice of having some important Mesta official in constant attendance upon the king gave the sheep owners a marked advantage, which they were to use most effectively in the sixteenth century in the struggles with their less favored and unorganized opponents. With this state of affairs in mind, we are quite pre 1 Arch. Mesta, F-2, Fuente Pinilla, 1509: an entregador's commission of 1435 in which the local judges are threatened with loss of office for failure to present all questions of difference between themselves and the entregador before the king. There was a similar provision in a commission of 1339: Arch. Hist. Nac., Calatr. Docs. Reales, iii, no. 220. * Arch. Mesta, F-2, Fuente Pinilla, 1509. pared to understand the significant step taken by Ferdinand and Another evidence of the bond which was so rapidly strengthening between the autocracy and the Mesta was the coöperation between the entregador and the corregidor, that ' cornerstone of the administrative edifice' of the Catholic Kings. The corregidor was instructed to assist the Mesta judge in the exercise of his privileges, and in some cases to sit with him in an advisory capacity. In the seventeenth century, when Spanish royalty had but a shadow of its former grandeur, this practice of sending the corregidor to reënforce the power of the entregador was resorted to in the forlorn hope of restoring some of the old prestige of the monarchy and the Mesta. The concentration of the control of the Mesta under the various branches of the central government was carried further, early in the sixteenth century, by certain new provisions concerning appeals. The commissions or appointments of entregadores issued in 1509, 1516, and 1529 emphasized the function of the royal chancillerías and the Council as the only appellate courts above the entregador. This set aside once and for all any possible remnant of the now almost obsolete claim of the proprietary entregador-in-chief to hear appeals in certain minor cases. Indeed, the Council seems to have taken particular pains during the 1 Martinez Salazar, Colección de . . . Memorias del Consejo (1764), pp. 221237, and Escolano de Arrieta, Práctica del Consejo Real (1796, 2 vols.), i, pp. 584587. See above, pp. 52 ff. * Mariéjol, L'Espagne sous Ferdinand et Isabelle (Paris, 1902), p. 172. › Arch. Mesta, R-2, Ruecas, 1497; A-5, Aledo, 1488; B-2, Béjar, 1498; A−9, Ávila, 1502; Prov. i, 18 (1498). • Arch. Ayunt. Cuenca, leg. 12, no. 5 (1509); Arch. Simancas, Diversos de Castilla, no. 909 (1516); Arch. Mesta, C-3, Candeleda, 1534 (1529). A good illustration of this point is found in a case which was tried in 1557, when the town of Magaña, near Soria, appealed from an entregador's sentence to the alcalde mayor of Burgos. The Royal Council immediately intervened and ordered that the appeal be carried to the chancillerfa at Valladolid. Arch. Mesta, B-4, Burgos, 1557. This was before the hostility between Council and chancillerías had become fully developed. See below, pp. 111 ff. 'Arch. Mesta, S-5, Siguenza, 1792: a commission of 1417. earlier years of the Hapsburg period to emphasize the royal source of the authority vested in the entregador. In a decree of 1516, for example, the city of Plasencia was forbidden to accept as legal the sentences of any judges who might call themselves entregadores, "unless they are appointed directly by the king." This was especially intended to check " certain judges appointed by the Count of Buendía [proprietary entregador-in-chief], who are authorized to examine only the boundaries of certain cañadas, whereas the entregadores appointed by the king are empowered to supervise pastures, enclosures, and all other affairs of the members of the Mesta." 1 The proprietary entregador, or entregador mayor, had thus become practically a nonentity, save for his title to the privilege of farming out certain lesser functions of Mesta administration. The change was largely due to the new absolutism of the sixteenth-century monarchy. His significance as a royal appointee disappeared as the President of the Mesta took over the prestige as well as the functions of his office. The transfer in 1568 of the ownership of that office from the Buendía family to the Mesta marks the end of any external or non-governmental control of the herdsmen and their gild. 1 Arch. Mesta, P-1, Plasencia, 1742. CHAPTER VI THE ENTREGADOR AND THE TOWNS Functions of the entregador. Contact with town authorities. Inspection and pro. tection of the cañadas. Restraint of marauders. Supervision of pastures, enclosures, and commons. Conflicts with the Cortes and with towns. Exemptions from the entregadores' visitations. Residencias or hearings of complaints. Restrictions upon entregadores by higher courts, Cortes, and town leagues. www - that which we THE first period of the history of the entregador have just been examining was concerned with the founding and fostering of the office by the crown, and the culmination of its power under the absolutism of the first Hapsburgs. The second period deals largely with the struggle to maintain the prestige of the Mesta and its magistrate against the towns and the landholders, but in this the entregador met with less and less success as the waning strength of his once autocratic royal ally slowly crumbled away in the seventeenth century. This disintegration of the monarchy, and the unchecked operation of the ancient Spanish predilection for separatism, spelled disaster for so unified and nationalized an institution as the Mesta. It was impossible for that body to function without the support of a strongly centralized administrative machine. We must, therefore, turn to an examination of the vital part played by the corps of entregadores in that machine, with special reference to the organization of this itinerant judiciary and its contact with local interests the number of judges, their jurisdiction and functions, and the chief phases of their conflicts with the towns. The earliest documents dealing with these magistrates give no definite indication of their number, but the references to their itineraries, which lay along the cañadas, or sheep highways, offer a basis for reasonably acceptable conjectures. It is known, for example, that two entregadores represented the Mesta in its negotiations with the Order of Calatrava, these two being " the |