[190] Citizens of Seville gave alms to the orphans and abandoned children of their city, hoping to keep these young people from lives of crime. Childhood, they believed, should be a time of holy innocence, beautifully illustrated in Murillo's painting, "Saint Michael the Archangel." Children might look questioningly at their elders, as the child is doing in this painting, but they listened dutifully. Angels directed their tiny feet and shielded them from evil.

Despite their preference for sweet and trusting cherubs, city residents kept bumping into swarms of tough little thieves on the streets. These rag-tag urchins, so wise in the ways of the world, alarmed officials, who repeatedly warned that "masterless children" would grow up to be adult criminals. Yet the evidence suggests that the city oligarchy found street children very useful in performing essential tasks for the city economy.

To discuss the living conditions, means of survival, socialization, and youth of these children is to describe a lively, juvenile street culture. In addition it demonstrates how crime feeds both itself, as an underworld subculture, and the concerns of those in political power.

One of the best descriptions of the living conditions of street children is the unpublished parish-by-parish survey that priests made of the honorable poor of Seville in 1667. ⁽¹⁾ According to [192] this survey, the poor lived collectively. Many lived in corrales, or courtyards surrounded by several low buildings. For example, in one courtyard near the Cathedral 22 children under the age of 10 years lived with two widows and one other husbandless woman. Another form of collective housing for poor adult females and children was the hacera, a row of houses sharing walls along one side of a Street. Typically, the houses of the poor were very crowded, providing little space or privacy, often lacking beds or other furniture. One priest reported in the 1667 survey a house with the following furniture: one small mattress, two mats made of rushes, three little seats made of straw, and one small box. Adults in households so crowded with people and so lacking in physical comforts must have constantly shooed the children outside to fend for themselves in the plazas and alleyways of the city.

Living conditions did not remain the same throughout the early modern period. The population of the city grew very rapidly in the sixteenth century; as houses bulged inside the city walls, more were built just outside. ⁽²⁾ Once a refuge for criminals and the site of rickety little hovels of prostitution, the land along the river in the last part of the sixteenth century was slowly transformed by new houses, shops, and public buildings. All this activity suggests that rents increased while the poor of the city lived more and more collectively in the houses they could afford. It also helps to explain why underworld people frequently lived in cheap inns or in makeshift hovels pushed up along the city walls and rubbish heaps, and why abandoned children often had no house at all.

With a falling birth rate, two serious epidemics, and more emigration to the New World than immigration into the city, Seville's population declined in the seventeenth century. The limited data available on births do not describe a birth pattern in the underworld; it is unlikely that underworld births were recorded in parish registers. Nevertheless, the sharp increase in the numbers of births in the sixteenth century and decline in [194] the following century, punctuated by two major epidemics, suggest that children in seventeenth-century Seville grew up with fewer children in their courtyards and row houses. They may have lived in less crowded houses, and they may have been able to live rent-free in abandoned buildings. A 1679 survey of the silk merchants' quarter, for example, revealed that 40 percent of the buildings were vacant. ⁽³⁾

Legal status is another reason to believe that street children did not grow up in isolation, for secular law included them in the larger community. Children of prostitutes and unknown fathers had a legal identity, and all children were entitled to support by their parents or other members of the community. The law also provided some protection against ill treatment by parents, as one seventeenth-century resident learned when he was exiled from the city for drowning his three-year-old son. ⁽⁴⁾ [195] Since no law prohibited adults from beating their children, street children probably found that their best defense was a pair of fast legs and a clever hiding place.

These street children grew up in contact with a larger community, but their living conditions fostered a distinctive juvenile subculture. Crowded by collective living patterns, they easily found many young companions in the freer streets and alleyways outside. Their meanly furnished homes, teeming with scolding women and flocks of children, would never be a symbol of stability and security to them. As soon as they had outgrown their swaddling bands, children were pushed out of the house to learn to care for themselves in a larger community. Their living conditions promoted a childhood that was relatively free from adult interference, but they also imposed the early necessity of learning to survive.

MEANS OF SURVIVAL

Murillo's painting "The Fruit-Eaters" depicts street children who are ragged but happy and well fed. Undoubtedly these children had to get their own food, for there is no hint of adult benevolence or support in this painting. From their posture they appear independent and self-sufficient. They can recognize their own hunger, and they know how to fend for themselves and fill their stomachs. To Murillo's street children of the rounded arms and rosy cheeks, survival was hardly a problem.

But the painting idealizes them. It ignores their dependence on the economy of the city, which faltered as well as flourished. The painting also masks the striking similarity between adult crime and the ways these children got their bread. Finally, it glosses over the ideology fostered by the particular ways that children survived. In this ideology survival was not only a central problem, it was the highest value.

Children unable to depend on adults for food had several ways to get bread. The very young turned mostly to begging, particularly for leftovers at the doorways of inns and wealthier homes. They hung around the markets, where they begged the leftover bread or partly spoiled produce that wouldn't keep [197] for the next day. It is doubtful that they drank much milk or ate many eggs. Fish was less expensive than meat, and fish scraps were probably more available. Since rice, potatoes, and corn were rare in Seville, the basic food of the children had to be bread.

As these children grew older and could perform useful tasks, they often became servants. They carried water, ran errands, swept floors, and accompanied fine ladies as they rode about the city in their sedan chairs. Many became servants to adult criminals. The boy who was called a gate-watch in underworld vocabulary was a look-out for ruffians. The news-mongerer gathered information through gossip and street chatter which suggested good criminal opportunities. ⁽⁶⁾

Basket-boys helped to move merchandise within the city, a task that grew with the population of Seville and the activity of its port. Stevedores were in great demand to load and unload ships and could not possibly provide all the transportation of goods required by merchants within the city. The problem became more acute when the city periodically banned carts on rain-damaged streets. Using children as basket-boys was one answer to a labor shortage.

Juvenile street hawkers helped to solve another problem, namely the lack of established markets in the newer areas of the city. Street hawkers brought bread and produce, charcoal, firewood, clothing, and bedding to these neighborhoods. During festivals they brought sweets and drink to the people crowding the streets. A child who acted as a street hawker had to be able [198] to handle money, and he had to be strong enough to carry his goods. He also had to be wise to the ways of wholesalers trying to exploit him.

As children grew up in the streets of Seville, they learned to make a living as gamblers and prostitutes. The law provided that a young girl could begin work in a city brothel if she could prove to a judge that she was older than twelve years, had lost her virginity, was an orphan, and was not a noble woman. ⁽⁷⁾ Most young girls probably became prostitutes more informally, however. A procurer might put her to work, or she might catch the eye of a more respectable citizen. A germanesca poem suggests the ease with which a constable could seduce a young girl of the streets:

And nearby a fresh
Young girl told me
That, being pretty and young,
She ground her mill.
Yesterday she earned six ducats,
And a constable loaned me
Three times a real and a half
In order to pay the inn. ⁽⁸⁾

Prostitution also offered a livelihood for boys. Some became pimps for their sisters or girl friends, but others became prostitutes themselves. A prison chaplain in Seville described a sheriff who owned "a house of play" in which he kept young boys, painted and elegant, for sodomy and male love-making. Some [199] boys involved in homosexual acts in Seville were as young as eight years, but it is likely that the younger boys were victims rather than working prostitutes. ⁽⁹⁾

Children growing up in the streets learned the tricks of gambling very early. Like the rascal in Quevedo's picaresque novel El Buscon, they learned to mark cards with pin pricks, scratches, and watermarks. They had decks with broad cards and narrow ones, which they could easily identify. Survival was not such a weighty problem when these young gamblers had mastered the finer points of their art, like loading and palming dice. ⁽¹⁰⁾

A child's success in winning his bread through these occupations depended to some extent on his cleverness, but it also depended on the economic fortunes of the city. As Seville grew into a world trade center in the sixteenth century, young prostitutes and gamblers found more people willing to spend money on various forms of amusements. Merchants were more open-handed in hiring basket boys and errand boys, and young street hawkers found no shortage of customers. However, the wealth of the city also attracted many people who were willing to perform the lowliest jobs, and these people sometimes competed with youthful street hawkers and basket boys.

These young bread-winners were especially vulnerable in times of famine, extreme weather, and epidemics. Drought was responsible for the high prices of wheat and meat in 1561, but the poor harvest for 1599-1600 may have reflected the major epidemic of that year. The price of wheat again rose in 1605, because of a bad harvest and a scourge of locusts. Children in the streets found that the money they could earn bought less food, and they also found that monasteries and churches were unable to distribute as much free bread in times of scarcity. ⁽¹¹⁾

[200] Periodically, health became a critical problem for street children. Their susceptibility to disease increased when food scarcity reduced their diet to bread alone. Living in very crowded houses and working in narrow streets, they came into contact with all the diseases that were present in the city. Some of these were no more serious than the frequent scourge of ringworm, but others were lethal plagues. Floods like that of 1618 also brought more disease to the children who often lived in houses along the river banks and frequented the inns and garbage heaps near the river. Since they lacked warm clothing and shoes, they died from exposure in severe winter weather. It snowed twice in the city during 1624-1626, an exciting novelty to many residents but a fearful time for barefoot children. Actual numbers are unknown for children who died of disease, starvation, and cold. One study of deaths in the parish of San Bernardo, a poorer district just outside the city walls, shows that 27 percent of the burials between 1617 and 1653 were of children sixteen years or younger, and that was not an unusual rate of juvenile mortality in the early modern period. ⁽¹²⁾

Survival must have been extremely difficult for underworld children born in 1640. When they were two years old, they had to survive the hardship, disease, and economic dislocation of a major flood. Five years later they shivered in a freezing rain that killed much of the wheat crop and greatly increased food prices. When they were nine years old a terrible epidemic struck their city. The children who did not die from the three kinds of plague running through Seville probably died of hunger. One merchant left a horrifying report of orphaned and abandoned [201] children wandering the streets. They slept in public doorways, and many died from exposure and hunger. Afraid to take them in because of the danger of infection, city residents put bread outside their windows or on the streets for the hungry children. ⁽¹³⁾

Problems of survival increased as the city's economic fortunes declined in the seventeenth century. Displaced by Cadiz as the major port for trade with the New World, and reeling from the economic dislocations of two serious epidemics in 1600 and 1649, Seville had much less wealth to sustain small beggars and young servants. Fewer people now came into the city to compete with its youthful prostitutes and street hawkers, but this also meant that there were fewer customers.

The ways that children of the streets earned their bread were strikingly similar to adult occupations in the underworld. Both juvenile and adult occupations were mobile, disdaining the fetters to a loom or shop for the greater freedom of the streets and inns. Antipathy to physical confinement in one place may have grown out of the mean housing conditions of the children, but it was certainly reinforced in adulthood by the conviction that rules and authorities were more easily evaded by physically mobile people. Underworld people used the word calle, which usually means street, to mean liberty, and children very early learned to associate streets with freedom. ⁽¹⁴⁾

Following the example of adult counterparts, underworld children learned to combine their occupations with theft. The basket boy who snitched flour from his master was only a smaller image of the adult retail bandit who sold watered-down wine. The small beggar who stole coins from the poor box at the church and the young prostitute who took what she could find in the pockets of her groggy client reflected the adult [202] underworld tendency to combine theft with other occupations. These children were also learning skills that they would use as adults.

Juvenile occupations fostered the ideology of the adult underworld. Survival was the highest value for the small beggar, the young basket boy, and the youthful prostitute; and these children quickly learned that this end justified most means. They learned in the streets that survival depended upon quickness to exploit. They learned the wisdom of the parasite, that survival depends upon preserving a healthy host. In El Buscon, Quevedo suggested that his young rogue learned this ideology at the knee of his surrogate father, who told him, "Look, lad, being a thief isn't just a job; it's a liberal profession." ⁽¹⁵⁾ Such father-son chats may have taken place in the underworld, but it seems far more likely that children of the streets learned an underworld ideology from their own attempts to earn bread.

Survival, then, was not simply a physical matter for them. It was also a question of cultural survival, and this fact greatly alarmed city fathers. They were glad to use the children for their own amusement or for economically useful tasks, and they were relieved to be spared the cost of feeding them in schools and orphanages. Nevertheless, the ways that the children survived served to socialize them into an underworld culture that seemed threatening to city fathers. As the Humanist Juan Vives warned, "The small sons of the needy are educated very perversely." ⁽¹⁶⁾ To children of the streets, the basic problem was survival; to city fathers, the central problem was socialization.

SOCIALIZATION

"Socialization" can be defined as the process by which a child becomes a member of a larger community. He learns the values of this community, and he learns skills so that he can assume a role in his community. He learns to accept restrictions on his behavior, and he learns the verbal and symbolic languages through which he can communicate with other people in his community.

[203] Traditionally, the family or household plays a major role in the socialization of children, but this pattern was modified in the case of Seville's street children, who often did not live with their biological parents. ⁽¹⁷⁾ Other adults might act as their sociological parents, but underworld children lacked a stable, continuous relationship with either a biological or a sociological father. Even in those cases where they lived with both parents, they could not depend upon them as their source for food. A hungry child who must go out to beg or steal bread on the streets has a very different relationship with the adults around him than the child who sits down to eat with his parents the food they have obtained and prepared for him.

To a certain extent, surrogate parents and criminal organizations played the traditional socializing roles of the family in the underworld. Cervantes described the criminal chief Monipodio in "Rinconete and Cortadillo," as the "father, master, and protector of thieves." ⁽¹⁸⁾ The pícaro Lazarillo de Tormes entered the larger world apprenticed to a cruel, blind beggar. ⁽¹⁹⁾ Underworld prostitutes often called their pimps and procuresses madre and padre, although these terms may not describe parental roles so much as a concept of parents as grasping and exploiting. ⁽²⁰⁾ To surrogate parents of the underworld, the first principle of parenthood was to exploit their children.

Children socialized themselves to a greater extent in the underworld than they did in traditional society. Their very living conditions placed them in close physical proximity to one another, pushed them out into the streets, and encouraged them to teach one another as youthful surrogate parents. Dependent upon their own efforts for food, they also learned through their [204] work to become members of a larger community. They learned the attitudes, values, and skills that were essential for survival - lessons that prepared them for adult roles and also helped to transmit an underworld ideology.

Play has long been recognized as a key in the socialization of children. Seville's street children were busy getting food, but they also had time for fun, Since they generally played free from any adult supervision, their games and pastimes demonstrate how the members of a juvenile subculture socialized one another. Several contemporary reports from early modern Seville as well as a study of children's games and amusements in sixteenth-century Spain provide evidence of their play. Though the latter is based largely on literary sources, the games and ditties required little education or equipment or adult supervision. It is very likely that underworld children played similar games. The concepts of two modern experts on child development, Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson, can be applied to this evidence in order to explore the ways that children socialized one another through their play.

Erikson has suggested that play permits a child "to try out some role pretensions within what he gradually learns is his society's version of reality." ⁽²¹⁾ The sixteenth-century boys who played matador in Seville's slaughterhouse had fun simply daring one another to more dangerous tricks, but they were also trying out the adult roles they had observed in the city's tournaments. That builfighters in real-life tournaments were nobles mounted on fine horses did not deter their play, for they were imitating adults who appeared very grand and heroic. They used the same graceful, quick movements to evade the rushing horns. As the cattle rushed the boys, however, they often bashed into the pillars supporting the roof. This infuriated city fathers who demanded that the city council prohibit the boys from teasing the cattle and damaging the city-owned slaughterhouse. ⁽²²⁾

[205] Public executions must have been impressive spectacles for children. Early in the seventeenth century a group of boys staged their own hanging. Imitating the adults they had observed in the main plaza, they constructed a makeshift gallows and hanged a six-year-old boy who had been chosen to play the victim. This imitative game was too successful, for the young victim died. ⁽²³⁾

Play was also a way for children to imitate or try out adult attitudes. In his study of children's games in the sixteenth century, Francisco Rodriguez Marín suggested that some ditties reflected the adults' prejudice against converted Jews and Moors. For example,

I, a sinner,
confess to Andero,
to Pedro Botija
and Anton Perulero. ⁽²⁴⁾

Blessed
fried bacon;
I praise
roasted bacon. ⁽²⁵⁾

[206] Erikson's concept of play as a way for children to try out the boundaries and possibilities of the adult world is evident in another rhyme:

Churchurumbé,
little goddess of honey;
stale bread;
and you're back on your tail. ⁽²⁶⁾

The problem with speculating about children's ditties is that we do not really know what these lines meant to children in early modern Seville. Many times children chant rhymes not for the meaning of their words, but for the pure joy of repeating familiar sounds. Like Mother Goose rhymes, these ditties may have outlasted their original significance. Children may repeat what is nonsense to them simply because nonsense is fun. Nonsense shared is even more fun. Since ditties are usually rhymes, they are readily learned. Older children can easily teach them to young children, and they become a collective rhetoric of humor and nonsense.

Despite the risks, however, it is instructive to look at some of the metaphors in the rhymes and games. Food figures very largely in the symbolic language, as in the ditties about bacon and stale bread. One explanation is that food is a basic everyday item that all children know. In addition, food metaphors may have appealed to street children who were very much concerned with feeding themselves.

Religious metaphors are also evident in the games and ditties. In one line game a dialogue is carried on with a player representing the monk "Fray Juan delas Cadenetas." ⁽²⁷⁾ Another ditty deals with heaven, the devil and divine judgment:

[207] He who gives and takes away,
He bears the devil.
He who gives, he who gives,
He will go to heaven.
He who gives and then takes away,
He will go to hell. ⁽²⁸⁾

Following an intricate set of rules is absolutely essential to the success (and fun) of a game such as "Fray Juan de las Cadanetas." Players stood in a line, holding hands, and the two at either end carried on the following dialogue:

Oh, Fray Juan de las Cadenetas!
What do you wish, sir?
How many loaves are there in the breadbasket?
Twenty-one, burned.
Who burned them?
That thief who is beside you.
Well, pass on the penalties that he never suffered. ⁽³¹⁾

When the players followed the rules of a game like "Fray Juan de las Cadenetas," they were learning to perform rituals as well as to accept rules. Both of these lessons were essential in the socialization of street children in Seville. As adults they would participate in the informal rituals of the marketplace and the port. They might become involved in more formal rituals in the courtroom or church. They would be spectators of other rituals, such as plays or processions or tournaments. Most important, they would need to know the collective symbolic language that rituals provide for a society. A growing child finds security and significance in rituals that prescribe patterns for conduct and endow them with special meaning. He also learns a way of symbolic thinking that is basic to his larger community.

Some ritualized play helps children learn to work out conflicts and deal with violence. Gang fights may be considered too serious for play, but they were certainly among the most popular amusements in Seville at the end of the sixteenth century. Each Sunday the boys and young men of rival gangs would gather for battles just outside the gates of the city. They had superimposed on their rivalries a time and place for battle, and an agreement to use stones and sidearms as weapons. ⁽³²⁾ It is not difficult to imagine smaller-scale neighborhood gang fights carried on by younger boys who ritualized their battle sites and weapons.

Underworld children learned many skills from their play. In ritualized games they learned to accept rules and think symbolically. Their rhymes taught them to communicate verbally and to understand the social nuances of words like "bacon" in the [209] antisemitic ditty. In tag they learned to move quickly, and in gang fights they learned to compensate with speed and cleverness for what they lacked in physical strength. Team games taught them the value of specialization and organization. Gambling games taught them some adult rituals as well as many tricks for cheating. Playing matador in the slaughterhouse taught them how to accept dares and how to challenge others.

Most important, play taught the street children how to survive. Free from adult supervision, these children had to learn to make and enforce their own rules. No protective, benevolent parent stood between a child and the penalties of his game. He had to learn to accept the outcome fatalistically, or he had to be stronger, faster, or more clever. The socialization of underworld children taught them that survival depended as much on wits as on bread.

YOUTH

When did childhood end for street children? When did they pass from their juvenile subculture into the adult underworld? Was there a "rite of passage" between childhood and adolescence and adulthood? What was the distinction between a child of the streets and a mozito (youth)?

There is no evidence of a formal initiation rite into adulthood in the underworld. Perhaps the legal age of criminal responsibility, fourteen, or the legal age for prostitution, twelve, divided children from adults. Some people may have considered poise and experience a better indication of adulthood. In Cervantes' story, Monipodio allowed the worldly-wise teenagers, Rinconete and Cortadillo, to enter his criminal organization without the usual apprenticeship period. ⁽³³⁾

One reason it is so difficult to find a dividing line between childhood and adulthood is that childhood was not a period of parental protection and guidance. The young street hawker had to be as adroit as the adult retail bandit in finding food for himself. On the other hand, the adult helper of a master thief [210] might be as exploited by his master as the young beggar who was apprenticed to a blind man. Dependency and exploitation knew no age limits.

The best way to distinguish between childhood and adulthood in the underworld may be to examine the attitudes of the larger community. To city fathers, children of the streets were a nuisance that they could sometimes use profitably; ragged and hungry, they were often to be pitied. As a child grew into adolescence, however, he grew as a threat. One sixteenth-century city father reported to the city council on the many "bad youths" who gathered on the steps of the Cathedral to plan robberies and meet other vagabonds. ⁽³⁴⁾ He urged the city council to get information on these young men and control them. His own lack of success in controlling them, he explained, resulted from the ill will these boys had shown him since he had tried to correct them. Whether this man was reporting as an official or simply as a father, his alarm is apparent.

Several factors may help to explain why street youths appeared so threatening. In the first place, they had become accomplished in criminal skills. Most of them had survived a childhood of the streets. They were experienced in theft and cheating, and they had already learned an underworld attitude of cynical exploitation. In addition, they were more physically able to carry out violence. A child had less choice of violent weapons, and less strength to use them. He could be overwhelmed more easily than an older youth.

More basically, youth can challenge adult authority, for it presents a sexual rivalry. The merchant who brushed aside the small boys in the street felt a much greater irritation about the brash, idle young men who hung around the city brothels. What is more, he usually had to deal with these young toughs in groups, for youth loves to act collectively in breaking adult taboos. ⁽³⁵⁾ On the other hand, adult hypocrites who, themselves, broke taboos were the targets for groups of gleeful young people. ⁽³⁶⁾ The young toughs who swaggered down the streets of [211] Seville moved together. They laughed uproariously at their own jokes, raucously insulted older citizens, and collectively bumped into adults whose position they were challenging, both literally and figuratively.

Finally, these idle young men tended not to fit into the mold that city fathers had prepared for them. They disdained the jobs that were available in the city, refusing to load and unload ships or even to train to become ships' pilots. They would not work as low-paid agricultural laborers, nor would they become well-mannered servants and lackeys for local aristocrats. These young people had become so jaded that churchmen and city officials could no longer hope to convert them into good citizens. Why waste time trying to train youths who were already hardcore thieves, dishonest and opportunistic cynics? These young hoods were more useful in killing one another off, filling military quotas, or justifying a hard line on law and order, a persuasive argument for stringent enforcement of curfew laws and regulations against carrying weapons.

In contrast, children of the streets appeared more vulnerable. They performed useful jobs in the city economy, and they provided vivid examples of the evil befalling people who lived outside the mores and customs of the city oligarchy. They were less able to challenge the city's adults or to carry out violence against them. One of the conditions of their survival was that they recognize their vulnerability, but this did not mean passive acquiescence. Perhaps their youth was more violent and explosive because they had stored up a childhood of anger at their own vulnerability. Perhaps city fathers most feared street children as youths because their swaggers proclaimed that they had survived without accepting the city oligarchy as their masters, that their underworld subculture persisted, refusing to be absorbed into the dominant culture. The young hoods who twirled their newly sprouted mustaches felt the heady exhilaration of having survived childhood in the streets. Strutting and crowing, they challenged city authorities. Here was new blood for the underworld and proof of its persistence.

1. Parroquias, HSC, parish of Santa Iglesia (the Cathedral).

2. Jaime Vicens Vives, An Economic History of Spain, trans. Frances M. López-Morillas (Princeton, 1969), p. 333. Domínguez Ortiz, Golden Age, p. 134. Dominguez Ortiz, Orto, p. 45.

3. Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, "La Alcaiceria de la Seda, de Sevilla, en 1679," Archivo Hispalense, Series 2, 44-45 (1966), 262-268.

4. Scott, Fourth Partida, Titles XV, XIX, XX, esp. pp. 952, 955-976. Memorias eclesiásticas, BC, 84-7-19, folio 103.

5. Herrera Puga, p. 68. Quevedo, pp. 198-199.

6. Salillas, p. 89.

7. Deleito y Piñuela, Mala, p. 36.

8. Juan Hidalgo, Romances de germanla de varios autores con el vocabularios por la orden del a.b.c. para declaracion de sus térrninos y lengua (Madrid, 1779), p. 149. The Spanish text is, "Y a ml dió por vecina/una muchacha reciente,/que por ser bella y muchacha/solo su molino muele./Ayer ganó seis Ducados,/y a mi me presto un chorchete/ para pagar la posada/real y medio en tres veces."

9. Pedro de León, appendix 1 to Part II, Cases 7, 8, 180, 181.

10. Quevedo, p. 210.

11. The 1561 drought is described in Memorias eclesiasticas, BC, 84-7-19, folios 39^V-40. A letter from the archbishop in 1599 reporting the Church's inability to distribute more wheat is in AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 3, No. 24. The 1605 dearth is reported in Memorias eclesiásticas, BC, 84-7-19, folio l02^V, and in Guichot y Parody, 2:159-160.

12. See Guichot y Parody, 2:174, for a description of the flood of 1618. Domínguez Ortiz, Golden Age, p. 326, reports the snowfalls. Poorly dressed children covered with grime and ringworm are described in Herrera Puga, p. 68. Juan Carriazo, "Negros, esciavos y extranjeros en el barrio sevillano de San Bernardo (1617-1629)," Archivo Hispalense, Series 2, Vol. 20, (1954), suggests that disease ran through crowded households, killing several members at the same time. City concern with the hazards in public health posed by the garbage heap and the low areas holding stagnant water between the city walls and the river is reported in Navarro Garcia, "Puerto," p. 146. The study of burials is in Carriazo, pp. 130-132.

13. The 1642 flood is reported in AMS, Sección Especial, Papeles del Conde de Aguila, Tomo 10 en folio. No. 30. The 1649 epidemic is described in Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:711-712, and Domínguez Ortiz, Orto, p. 88. A remarkable firsthand account of this epidemic is in Memorias de diferentes cosas sucedidas en esta muy noble y mui leal ciudad de Sevilla copiaronse en Sevilla año de 1696, BC, 84-7-21. The merchant's description is on folio 99^V.

14. Hill, p. 110.

15. Quevedo, p. 86.

16. Vives, p. 280.

17. For socializing roles of traditional families, see Arnold Gesell and Frances L. Ilg, Infant and Child in the Culture of Today; The Guidance of Development in Home and Nursery School (New York, Evanston, and London, 1943), p. 4; and William J. Goode, The Family (Englewood Cliffs, 1964), p. 2.

18. Cervantes, "Rinconete," p. 94.

19. Bataillon, p. 19.

20. Salillas, pp. 90, 99.

21. Erik H. Erikson, "Play and Actuality," in Maria W. Piers, ed., Play and Development (New York, 1972), p. 152.

22. AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 11, No. 75.

23. Papeles varios, BC, 85-4-11.

24. Francisco Rodríguez Marín, Pasatiempo folklorico; Varios juegos infantiles de siglo XVI (Madrid, 1932). The Spanish text is, "Yo pecandero/ me confieso a Andero,/a Pedro Botija/y Antón Perulero."

25. Ibid.; the Spanish text is, "Benedito/tocino frito;/alabao/tocino asao..."

26. Ibid., p. 38. The Spanish text is, "Churchurumbé,/deaíta de miel;/ pan duro;/que te vuelvas de cub."

27. Ibid., p. 23.

28. Ibid., P. 34. The Spanish verse is, "Quien da y quita/se lo lleva la perra maldita./Quien da, quien da,/a la gloria se va;/quien da y luego quita,/a la gloria maldita."

29. Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood (New York, 1962), pp. 87, 112-113.

30. Rodriguez Marín, Pasatiempo, p. 6.

31. Ibid., Pp. 23-24. The Spanish text is, "Ah, fray Juan de las Cadenetas!/¿Qué mandáis, senor?/¿Quantos panes hay en el arca?/Veinte y un quemados./¿Quién los quemó/Ese ladrón que está cabe vos./Pues, pase las penas que nunca pasó."

32. Domínguez Ortiz, "Vida," pp. 165-166.

33. Cervante, "Rinconete," pp. 100-101.

34. AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 12, No. 44.

35. Christian, Person, p. 25.

36. Ibid., pp. 25-26. Davis, Society, chapter 4.