Chapter 8: Madrid and the Spanish Economy

THE LIBRARY OF IBERIAN RESOURCES ONLINE Madrid and the Spanish Economy David R. Ringrose

Part Three Madrid and the Spanish Economy *** Chapter 8 The Countryside and the City: Context and Contact in the Rural Economy
[164] I. The Rural Context

In this study we assume a peninsular economic dualism in which the coastal provinces could look to the sea for economic opportunities, while the interior had no choice but to turn in on itself and make do with limited resources, poor transport, and unreliable harvests. Such circumstances restricted market-oriented agriculture and encouraged regional self-sufficiency.⁽¹⁾ Thus historians who comment on the lack of an interior market in Spain are partly correct, but they are also guilty of oversimplification. At the level of local, intraregional life, there were durable, functioning markets and money economies.⁽²⁾ In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, these exchanges were integrated into a long-distance commercial network centered in Toledo and Valladolid. In the early seventeenth century this integration of local and long-distance economies broke down, and regional isolation was intensified. Meanwhile, a politically supported network of supply arrangements evolved around Madrid. Extending throughout central Spain, this system gradually came to be regarded as a functioning market by its participants.

[165] Central Spain was inherently an isolated, regionally self-sufficient agricultural society.⁽³⁾ Most production (livestock excepted) occurred on peasant farms, sometimes owned but more often rented, with rents and other obligations commonly paid in kind.⁽⁴⁾ The farther south one went in the Castiles, the more likely it was that the peasant was a tenant, and the greater the dependence on day wages. Self-sufficiency was based on overlapping regional commodity exchanges that were sometimes not far from barter.⁽⁵⁾ Thus the villages of the mountains exchanged wood, fuel, and cattle for the cereals and wine of the plains.⁽⁶⁾ In the small cities and towns there were potters, weavers, shoemakers, harness-makers, and blacksmiths who provided the necessary rough manufactures for the region.⁽⁷⁾ Exchanges rarely transcended a 50 to 75-mile radius created by terrain and transport that could double the price of wheat within 100 miles.⁽⁸⁾

This indicates that a lack of concentrated markets was a basic aspect of the economy of the interior. Coastal areas could meet local agricultural food shortages from cheaper maritime sources before prices got high enough to cover transport from inland suppliers.⁽⁹⁾ After the de-urbanization of the seventeenth century, interior markets were limited to a few cities of under 25,000 inhabitants, reducing internal trade to export-oriented grazing and "the exchange of domestic products and merchandise from one region to another in the interior."⁽¹⁰⁾ The Castilian rentier class was thus confronted with limited possibilities for transforming agricultural products into other forms of wealth. The physical isolation of interior Castile made it difficult to reach extra regional markets with agricultural staples that could be exchanged for [166] imports.⁽¹¹⁾ Such exchanges encourage regional specialization and greater productivity, but interior conditions favored commodities too bulky to absorb the cost of primitive transport and remain competitive beyond the local context.⁽¹²⁾ The same conditions limited the import of staples when crops failed. The result was economic self-sufficiency, a lack of specialization, low productivity, and vulnerability to unstable weather.⁽¹³⁾

These difficulties did not prevent the Old Regime from mobilizing agricultural staples for use as exchange for imports to some extent. Church, state, and landlords used taxes, tithes, señorial obligations, jurisdictional authority, restrictions on access to land,⁽¹⁴⁾ and rural indebtedness to create a maze of nonmarket mechanisms through which a small elite accumulated agricultural products to use as payments for imports into an otherwise regionally self-sufficient agriculture.⁽¹⁵⁾ A large part of the output collected by rentiers was received as tithes, tercias reales, and alcabalas that had been ceded to the nobility by the Crown. Consequently, the landed elite was often unable to control the way in which the land that supported them was actually used.⁽¹⁶⁾ The perennial indictment of the system is that it prevented the conversion of land to more productive uses--although without markets and transport the complaint seems hypothetical. It also leaves out another actor--the small [167] town labrador rico who produced marketable surpluses. These local notables, powerful in decisions about village land-use, not only were part of the system that collected rents and tithes for absentee rentiers but were involved in market-oriented agriculture. They emerge as important in nineteenth-century politics, but were present much earlier.

The landed elites apparently collected 30-50% of agricultural output, and, depending on the balance between grazing and farming, 20-80% of that revenue was in the form of wheat, barley, rye, wine, and wool--some of which were commodities difficult to exchange for other forms of wealth.⁽¹⁷⁾ Where direct control of the land was possible, managerial solutions included the diversion of land to grazing, which produced salable wool and hides; storage of grain until crops were poor and local prices rose, and dependence on markets created by the revenue economy of the state.⁽¹⁸⁾ Exploitation of periodic shortage is hardly novel. Castilian harvests were sensitive to the weather, and a decline of only 15% in supplies reaching Madrid spelled hardship.⁽¹⁹⁾ Under such conditions, local bread prices fluctuated as much as 400% in a single year. Able to store grain from harvest to harvest, rentiers loaned or sold it when supplies ran short. The small farmer, unable to store reserves, had to accept low prices after good harvests and had no salable surplus after a bad harvest, when he might have gotten a higher price. Consequently, he was increasingly bound to the landlord who provided credit, seed grain, or rent deferrals.⁽²⁰⁾ The rentier also took advantage of high food prices to transport commodities to otherwise unprofitable markets. Thus the landed elites strengthened their control of rural society while turning some of their stock into cash.⁽²¹⁾

In practice, the isolation and self-sufficiency of Castilian agriculture varied considerably and became more pronounced as Madrid grew to dominate the regional urban network. During the sixteenth century, while plague, war, and Turkish expansion sapped the vitality of the Mediterranean provinces, the interior experienced a prosperity based on favorable land/labor ratios, stable [168] government, and craft industries with both European and Arabic techniques at their command. Population growth stimulated regional industries which in turn participated in the maritime market system. Textiles in Segovia, Guadalajara, Cuenca, and Ávila, ceramics at Talavera, wool at Valladolid and Burgos--all fed a market network based on Toledo, with its own woolens, silks, and weapons industries and active entrepot trade. Stimulated by European economic expansion, the prosperity of this complex was reinforced by the wealth of the American empire until after 1575.⁽²²⁾ Castile's population expanded from 3.1 to 5.9 million between 1530 and 1591, with the most rapid increases in the earlier decades.⁽²³⁾ The relationship of population to market development in New Castile is apparent in the concentration of population growth near Toledo and Madrid which is shown in Table 8.1.

Not surprisingly, serious stresses soon appeared in the Castilian economy as population and urban development outstripped its economic potential.⁽²⁴⁾ The smaller cities of the interior were already declining in the 1590's, undermined by the fiscal policies of the Crown, the Dutch wars, and disruption of international commerce and credit. Rising taxes and prices, diversion of domestic buying power to foodstuffs, and lower production costs abroad undermined the textile markets of Segovia, Cuenca, and Toledo. In the last decades of the sixteenth century, inflation and the acceptance of new varieties of cloth worked to the disadvantage of Castilian woolens. After 1610 the international market for woolens collapsed, and all the major producers-- Venice, England, the Low Countries--experienced difficulties. Under these circumstances, Spanish woolens not only lost their foreign markets but were displaced from domestic markets by cheaper imports.⁽²⁵⁾

Table 8.1. Population of Castilian Provinces Near Madrid, 1541 and 1591

Province	1541	1591	Increase
Segovia (a)	33,795	41,413	23%
Guadalajara	16,157	39,901	52
Cuenca	33,341	65,368	97
Avila	31,153	37,758	21
Toledo (total)	80,957	147,549	82
Toledo (less city)	73,957	135,549	83
Madrid (total)	13,312	31,932	140
Madrid (less city)	7,312	22,391	206
Totals	208,715	363,921	66.3
Totals (less cities)	195,715	342,380	66.0

Source: Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée, vol. 1, p. 370.
a. Garcia Sanz, in Desarrollo y crisis, pp. 45-46, gives different estimated populations, but they are derived from the same vecino counts and show the same percentage of change.

García Sanz shows how, as the rural population of Segovia grew, it released less and less grain to the market, urban supply became erratic, and regional [169] markets for non-food products weakened. The smaller towns succumbed to pressure from the larger cities, which in turn were undermined by the same conditions.⁽²⁶⁾ The economies of the provincial cities were further weakened as the nobility shifted investments to government offices and annuities and to real estate in the growing capital, ultimately moving their households there. At best the population of Castile reached a precarious equilibrium by the turn of the seventeenth century, and had declined 25% by 1646.⁽²⁷⁾ Beginning with an epidemic that killed over 500,000 people in 1596-1602, the rural population was under heavy pressure.⁽²⁸⁾ Castile lost 4,000 people yearly to America and, after 1635, as many as 12,000 men to the military, while Madrid absorbed over 4,000 young adults every year.⁽²⁹⁾ There were severe [170] subsistence crises in 1606-07, the late 1620's, and the 1640's, the last two accompanied by plague in southern and possibly central Spain.⁽³⁰⁾

Table 8.2. Estimated Population (a) of Castilian Towns, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

City	1530	1594	1646	1694
Toledo	28	65	15	23
Valladolid	30	45	13.5	16.5
Salamanca	12	22	13	11
Burgos	7	12	3	8
Falencia	6	13	4	4
Avila	7	13	5	4
Medina	19	12	3	4
Segovia	14	25	(10?)	7
Totals	123	207	66.5	77.5
Madrid	20	65	150	120

Sources: Niehaus, "Population Problems," p. 44; Domínguez Ortiz, Siglo XVII, pp. 137-140; José Larraz López, La época del mercantilismo en Castilla, 1500-1700 (1943), pp. 94-95; and Juan Plaza Prieto, Estructura económica de España en el siglo XVIII (1975), pp. 100-101.
a. Expressed in thousands. Excluding some Madrid and Valladolid figures, the estimates are based on vecinos multiplied by 4.5.

Whatever the mixture of negative forces, the decline of the urban network around Madrid is apparent in the population figures for Castilian cities in Table 8.2. In the 1590's, the Castilian urban system contained 200,000 consumers in addition to the 65,000 in Madrid. A century later, the same system included only 78,000 people in addition to Madrid's population of 120,000.⁽³¹⁾ Serious rural depopulation hit eastern Toledo and western Guadalajara provinces, although the mountain villages suffered smaller losses because of their isolation.⁽³²⁾ A survey of 31 towns in south-central Toledo found a total of 9,588 vecinos in 1590, 5,033 in 1646, and only 3,435 in 1715.⁽³³⁾ As urban [171] demand declined and labor became scarce, agriculture shifted to crops that required less labor or were better suited to local conditions, and landlords favored livestock in the search for products that could be used or exchanged under the new situation.⁽³⁴⁾

By 1700 the low point had been passed, and the rural population was drifting upward. The 1760's saw concern over landless transients, evidence of land hunger and enclosures in the villages, and competition for communal grazing land.⁽³⁵⁾ This was accompanied by greater vulnerability to food shortages and expansion of grain farming under traditional patterns of tenure.⁽³⁶⁾ This gave individual farmers little reason to produce beyond immediate needs, since in a landlord's rental market the landlord soon captured the benefits. If anything, productivity per acre fell as less fertile land came into use, farmsteads were fragmented, and older land was farmed more intensively. Some communities were having difficulty producing surpluses for regional markets as early as the 1750's. As a measure of the demand for farmland, pasture rents rose 150% between 1710-39 and the 1790's, while the price of the wool produced on them rose only 82%.⁽³⁷⁾ As early as 1739, townspeople near Madrid were protesting enclosure of montes y baldíos because it reduced pasturage for the animals used to connect their sizable bread industry with its market in Madrid.⁽³⁸⁾

Evidence of wheat production in the provinces of Sevilla, Segovia, and Zamora shows good yields until the 1750's, a drop in the 1760's, a peak in the early 1780's, and then a pronounced decline accompanied by subsistence crises.⁽³⁹⁾ At the same time, the seed/yield ratios on the fertile and well-watered bottomland around Aranjuez fell from 1:10 in the 1770's to 1:7.5 in 1782-95. This, too, suggests expansion of cultivation onto poorer land without improvement in technique.⁽⁴⁰⁾ These indicators are supported by changes in production reflected in tithe returns (see Table 8.3). Cereal production rose in only 5 of the 14 areas documented. The three examples of stagnation are [172] composites of tithes collected throughout large dioceses. All indications of increases in output are confined to the central "breadbasket" areas of Old Castile and León.

Table 8.3. Change in Average Annual Wheat Production in Various Locations Between 1726-41 and 1790-1808(a)

Town	Province	Change
Granja	Zamora	-42%
Riego	Zamora	-16
Zarza	Salamanca	+92
Toro	Toro	+67
Paredes de Nava	Valladolid	+88
Villarramiel	Valladolid	+33
Valbuena de Duero	Valladolid	-17
Arévalo(b)	Segovia	+30
Bocequillas	Segovia	-9
Ajalvir	Madrid	-16
Alcalá de Henares (c)	Madrid	-12
	Palencia (a, d)	+ 4
	Toledo (d)	-1
	Sevilla (d)	-4

Source: Anes, Las crises agrarias, pp. 151-157.
a. Periods averaged for Falencia, Paredes de Nava, and Villarramiel, 1728-32 and 1787-97.
b. Terminal period for Arévalo: 1771-89.
c. This district, now in Madrid province, was part of Toledo before 1835.
d. Provincial averages based on scattered episcopal holdings.

Described as "static expansion," this situation saw population and production growth tightly linked, but neither provoked structural change.⁽⁴¹⁾ The growth of rural population and diminishing returns in agriculture threatened a reduction of marketable surpluses, even as the authorities sought to increase their mobility. Thus it is not surprising that, despite slow population growth, fragmentary statistical and literary evidence shows rural stagnation lasting well past the middle of the eighteenth century.⁽⁴²⁾

[173] This "static expansion" without structural change is supported by the pattern of authorized enclosures between 1755 and 1773. Of 200 permits, 183 involved conversion of forest and pasture to cultivation, while only a handful mentioned grazing or vineyards. A third of the permits requested division of the land among the vecinos because of local shortage of farmland. Much of the land was described as mediocre, and the process resembles that stimulated by late sixteenth-century land shortage.⁽⁴³⁾

The static aspect of the eighteenth-century countryside should not be overstated, and it is apparent that not all enclosure was a response to local land hunger. In 17 towns the councils were changing the rental status of their propios to pay for public works or tax obligations.⁽⁴⁴⁾ Even more intriguing are the enclosures leased as large open fields. This suggests capitalist farming, as do 21 enclosures by religious institutions, wealthy labradores, and titled nobles. These cases hardly offset the volume of conversions that simply extended village subsistence economies, and clearly the rural situation was complex. In particular, the enclosures by nobles sometimes involved over 2,000 fanegas of land in two or three communities. It is hard to escape the conclusion that these were management decisions reflecting a changing grain market.⁽⁴⁵⁾

This is also suggested by the geographic distribution of enclosure, which was concentrated in regions linked to Madrid's supply system. The 142 enclosures that could be located produced the regional distribution given in Table 8.4. Nevertheless, it appears a weak response to the progressively more intense supply crises in the capital and an ever-widening search for rural surpluses that could be channeled toward urban consumption.⁽⁴⁶⁾

[174] Table 8.4. Regional Distribution of 142 Enclosures, 1755-1773

Region	No. of Enclosures	Percentage of Total
Crown of Aragón	18	12.5%
Andalucía	16	11.5
Extremadura	33	23.0
Madrid hinterland (New Castile and Segóvia)	53	37.0
Remaining provinces	22	16.0
Totals	142	100.0%

Source: Based on Anes, Las crises agrarias, p. 459.

II. Regional Market Structures

Contrary to the strong impression that the Castilian interior was characterized by structural rigidity and local isolation, the preceding section indicates the presence of numerous links with the urban market. Those links were part of an institutional structure sustained by the need to provide an adequate urban supply and to prevent urban unrest. They provided the context for evolution of a Madrid-oriented supply system driven by market forces. By the end of the eighteenth century, Liberal economics, the rising cost of administrated supply, and massive war debts were pushing the monarchy toward abandonment of all government subsidies and administered commodity flows.⁽⁴⁷⁾

Despite the static appearance of the rural economy, the urban supply network could not have functioned without mechanisms for exchanging and accumulating commodities in the countryside. In practice, the interior combined local and long-distance markets with various nonmarket arrangements that consolidated supplies which then became potentially marketable. The principal channels for consolidation of stocks were tithe collections, including the share owned by the Crown; rents in kind from land; and accumulation by religious communities and farmers working the soil themselves.⁽⁴⁸⁾ Purchases for military supply reflected local market prices, but were the result of political rather than market-inspired decisions. In the early phases of Madrid's growth particularly, the city's recurrent forays into more distant markets had [175] the same quality. Tithes, rents, and direct exploitation provided the basic stock of commodities available outside rural households and transferable outside local communities.

Working at odds with the accumulation of staples for regional exchange and export were the local granaries and charitable agencies that attempted to insure peasant communities against recurrent crop failure. Spain had a tradition of municipal grain depots endowed as charitable public services. These pósitos held capital assets, maintained stocks of grain that they loaned to farmers, and charged a nominal interest to cover their costs. The Crown encouraged these depots during the eighteenth century, creating a Superintendencia de Pósitos. This system expanded rapidly after 1750, as benefactors endowed a truly impressive policy of organized grain-hoarding.⁽⁴⁹⁾ Designed to help the small farmer, these agencies tied up substantial assets and large inventories of wheat. By 1800, many smallholders were dependent on these agencies. Between 1751 and 1793, while the population of Castile rose 25%, granary reserves almost doubled--from 5,400,000 bushels to 9,300,000 bushels--and reached 15%-20% of annual consumption.⁽⁵⁰⁾ This development helps explain the relative tranquility of the countryside that Callahan finds so striking in eighteenth-century Spain.⁽⁵¹⁾

The pósitos were thus a major part of the grain market, absorbing ever more of the yield of good harvests and buffering the countryside against bad ones. While this stabilization of rural grain supplies helps explain rural stability, it also meant that the countryside competed with Madrid for available supplies and cut into the stocks available for commercialization. To the extent that they moderated price fluctuations, granary reserves also reduced the rentier's ability to profit from his accumulated stocks. This no doubt contributed to contemporary criticism that rentier ownership contributed little to the development of an agricultural sector that could export to the cities and to distant markets in return for goods and services. It has even been suggested that the deregulation of the grain trade after 1765 encouraged this hoarding, because speculative grain accumulation, an aspect of market development, aggravated price instability and encouraged protective accumulation.⁽⁵²⁾ Thus, while the pósitos absorbed a growing volume of rural surpluses, they were part of the pattern of regional self-sufficiency and mitigated against the development of a national market.

[177] Operating alongside the redistributive agencies of society and the state, two genuine market structures persisted. One, based on fairs and clearing centers such as Trujillo, Arévalo, Sangarcía, Villalón, La Bañeza, and Illescas, concentrated surpluses for sale to the world of urban demand and exports (for geographic detail, see Map 8.1 and Chapter 9, Section II). Most of these goods traveled to complementary interior regions or to the modest provincial cities, and they rarely moved more than 50-75 miles. Overall, however, the network produced limited exports to the coast to pay for a modest now of luxuries and manufactures for distribution at interior fairs. The second market network took the form of numerous weekly mercados and facilitated local and district self-sufficiency. This pattern has been documented for the Tierra de Campos, in the province of Segovia, the señorío of Buitrago, and elsewhere. The conflict of interests between local residents benefiting from one or another level of transaction is an important part of the problem of rural response to urban demand.⁽⁵³⁾

This tension is most clearcut in the case of the much-maligned wool industry. Since wool was the most easily marketable commodity of the interior, it was a perennially important factor in the behavior of people able to divert land to grazing. For centuries, wool was Spain's principal export and source of foreign exchange. Thus it is hardly surprising that much of the interior was committed to pastures by the landed elite. Wool production was highly monetized, with money rentals for pasture, money wages for the labor force, and profits in hard currency. Wool exports rose during the eighteenth century, and in 1795 two-thirds went to England. To keep things in perspective, we should note that the 277,000 arrobas of wool exported in 1795 brought a return of 80 million reales.⁽⁵⁴⁾ While this is barely half the value of agricultural commodities consumed by Madrid each year, it explains why even modest landowners and tenants maintained surprisingly large flocks despite scarce grazing. It was the best way of participating in the regional and long-distance economy.⁽⁵⁵⁾

Compared with the wool trade or the Madrid supply market, exports of staples like wheat and wine were modest. Quantities were traded between complementary locales within Castile, and some reached the Cantabrian [178] Mountains in the north,⁽⁵⁶⁾ but the coasts of Asturias and Galicia made up deficits in local production with wine imported from Catalonia, Andalucía, or France. In Galicia, outside of the most localized exchanges, only cattle were traded (to Madrid and Castile) for a few Palencian and Segovian textiles.⁽⁵⁷⁾

The wheat trade was slightly more important, especially in the nineteenth century. A modest export of wheat and flour from Old Castile developed at the end of the eighteenth century, involving 100-150,000 fanegas yearly destined for the military, but this clearly taxed the market for disposable supplies.⁽⁵⁸⁾ The north coast towns sometimes used Castilian wheat, but their deficits were greatest when Castile had the least grain to spare and everyone was importing from abroad.⁽⁵⁹⁾ A flour-milling industry and export trade appeared around Santander, but late eighteenth-century exports accounted for only 10-20,000 fanegas of Castilian wheat yearly, in contrast to the 750,000-1,000,000 consumed by Madrid. Even this trade decayed after the Restoration in 1814, as grain producers and merchants in Falencia complained about the decay of the Reinosa highway to Santander.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Grain exports were briefly important in the nineteenth century as the Canal of Castile cheapened transport and grazing land was put under cultivation.⁽⁶¹⁾ But this hardly compensated for the decline of wool as a cash crop,⁽⁶²⁾ and it can be argued that the interior was becoming even more isolated.

Thus Madrid loomed very large in Castilian exchanges outside the context of regional self-sufficiency, and only the wool trade offered much alternative. Exports of wheat and wool from Castile to the outside world were really adjuncts to a Madrid-based network for turning agricultural commodities into disposable wealth.

Both regional and long-distance trade depended heavily on the politically [179] created wealth of the capital city. By the nineteenth century, the disparity between Madrid and the other urban markets of the interior had become even more pronounced. The combined population of 15 Castilian cities and towns increased by 40,000 between 1797 and 1860 (from 123,300 to 163,900), but virtually all of the growth was confined to Valladolid and Burgos. Valladolid developed as Old Castile's regional market center, Burgos as the transit point between Castile and Vizcaya. In the same period, Madrid alone added 100,-000 people, reaching 300,000 inhabitants in 1860.⁽⁶³⁾

Within this amalgam of nonmarket transfers, local exchanges, limited exports, and a politically supported market for staples, we can see the basis for a mercantile community. Many urban residents extended their investments from various mercantile occupations to the urban supply trade. Francisco Cabarrús is but the most spectacular example of activities long dominated by the retail merchants of the Five Major Guilds (Cinco Gremios Mayores). As individuals, through guild-based companies, and through the Compañía General de Comercio sponsored jointly by the Cinco Gremios, these merchants enlarged their activities far beyond their origins. They formed numerous partnerships; they held deposits at interest; they farmed municipal taxes; and they extended credit to private borrowers, the city, and the Crown. They had a long-standing interest in urban supply, and in the 1780's undertook management of the whole municipal supply system. The merchants of the Cinco Gremios were part of a community of supply contractors, grain merchants, wealthy brokers, and business agents at the center of a web of fiscal, credit, and commercial links with the agricultural interior and the maritime world. One of the ironies of this growing sophistication is that the Cinco Gremios, involved in both commercial circuits, were instrumental in shifting urban demand from interior to distant suppliers, providing one of the mechanisms that precluded urban growth from stimulating the economy of the Castilian hinterland.⁽⁶⁴⁾

The Cinco Gremios were but part of a community of wholesalers, administrators, business agents, and contractors in the city--a community that was extended across the countryside and its regional exchange systems by the government system of purchasing agents, transport controls, and pasture allocations. Reaching beyond the readily commercialized areas within 75 miles of the city, this system drew in wheat, hogs, cattle, sheep, and charcoal while creating a pool of men informed about market and supply conditions from Córdoba to Falencia to Galicia. This expertise was easily transferred to [180] private entrepreneurs, and government agents sometimes entered trade on their own. The muleteers of Sangarcia in Segovia long provided transport for the Castilian wheat owned by the Madrid Pósito, but after the liberalization of the grain trade they went into business on their own. They evolved a tight local association that included 20 sedentary merchants who used their own capital and hired local carriers and Castilian agents. By the end of the century, they handled 30,000 fanegas of wheat annually and were accused of speculation and manipulating prices in Madrid. They signify an important extension of Madrid's private grain market into northern supply areas, one made possible by government initiatives.⁽⁶⁵⁾

Developments like this: the Galician cattle trade; the Andalusian oil trade; the livestock fairs at Mérida, Trujillo, La Bañeza, and Talavera; the grain markets at Villalón, Olmedo, Arévalo, Navalcarnero, Guadalajara, and Illescas; the wholesale grain dealers in towns around the capital; and the efforts of livestock, olive oil, soap, and charcoal producers to penetrate the urban market, all point to the evolution of a network of commercial arrangements focused on Madrid (Map 8.1). Thus it was that the long-term maintenance of Madrid as capital and the administrative diversion of Castilian commodities to the city encouraged a self-propelled market network that required only consistent support for the economy of the city.⁽⁶⁶⁾

An outstanding example of someone who emerged from the Old Regime blend of public and private commercial life is Juan de Álvarez y Mendizabal, Prime Minister in 1836 and sponsor of the disentailment of monastic lands. Born of a Cádiz merchant family, he was involved in contracting military supplies for the Cádiz government of 1808-12, and by 1819 was partner with the Valencian supply contractor Vicente Bertrán de Lis in supplying Ferdinand VII's army of Andalucía. In the 1830's he emerged as a leading Liberal politician and financier, providing a choice example of how the internal supply network of the eighteenth century produced important elements of Spain's nineteenth-century leadership.⁽⁶⁷⁾

Under men like Mendizabal, nineteenth-century Spain saw the wholesale abolition of institutions they considered obsolete. The process had begun much earlier, and its acceleration was partly due to an internal power vacuum. This left the field open to potential and actual participants who had [181] found the system of concessions discriminatory and uncomfortable. Favoring an unregulated market, they endorsed ideological and institutional arrangements that implied deregulation. A symptom of this change is seen in the fact that beginning as early as 1803, state sales of land authorized the new owners to expel tenants or raise rents. The new nineteenth-century proprietors thus threatened the isolation of rural communities, while the sale of municipal land weakened the autonomy of local government and pushed many small farmers toward dependence on day-labor.⁽⁶⁸⁾ Despite these hints of change, the underlying structures that tied city and hinterland together were little affected. They reflect the dominance of Madrid as consumer of the disposable surpluses of the entire interior from the Cantabrian Mountains to the Sierra Morena and from the Portuguese border to the Kingdom of Aragón.

III. The Producers in the Market Network

Our final step in tracing the urban market system back to the rural society that supplied it requires a look at the people who had surpluses to sell. The sellers are easy to identify, at least in general terms; how they acquired their surpluses is a much more complicated problem. The documents contain several accounts listing people who sold wheat and livestock to the city market. The livestock transactions have a relatively modern air, but this is because distance and geography did not hamper long-distance livestock marketing as much as transfers of less mobile commodities. It is important to recall the relative importance of the commodities in Madrid's supply trade. Around 1800, beef and mutton sales reached 30 million reales and charcoal about 6 million, but a conservative estimate would put the grain trade at well over 60 million reales.

The meat supply was the center of two distinct markets. As of 1797-98, 45% of sheep and 39% of cattle were sold directly to the Madrid stockyards by private parties, indicating a sizable direct-market response. The remainder were purchased by government agents at regional livestock fairs.⁽⁶⁹⁾ Direct sales to the slaughter yards were dominated by a few large suppliers. A typical monthly account in 1798 shows that 31 vendors provided 902 cattle, but 55% of that total came from a single source in the form of four weekly consignments--and because of the high prices his stock commanded, that purveyor captured a considerably larger share of the sale revenue. Seven others supplied more than ten cattle each, some appearing as regular participants in the market; the other 23 individuals in the sample, many from carting communities around the country, supplied 9% of the total, usually at [182] lower prices. Clearly they were disposing of worn-out or surplus draft animals while in the city. Sheep sales show a similar pattern, with one of 12 vendors providing 36% of 9,236 animals, again in weekly shipments. Six other individuals sold more than 500 sheep each and provided 49% of the total; the remaining 15% came from smaller shipments, one being only 98 head.⁽⁷⁰⁾

This reveals a private market serving a supply concession that, while dominated by two large vendors who were probably brokers, did not exclude smaller participants. The two major purveyors were doing business at the rate of 250-400,000 reales monthly, a very substantial business for the time. It is worth noting that the last name of the major cattle supplier--Aguirre--is the same as that of the treasurer of the municipal supply office of the Cinco Gremios Mayores, the meat-supply contractor at the time. The summary account of the previous year also shows three entries, totaling over 1,000 cattle, from two Basque firms importing similarly expensive cattle from Navarra and France.

Meanwhile, 55% of sheep and 61% of cattle were purchased by meat-supply agents visiting regional livestock fairs in Trujillo, Salamanca, Zamora, Pedroches de Córdoba, Torremocha, Zafra, and La Bañeza. A detailed account of the purchase of 2,276 cattle at the Trujillo fair in 1798 (see Table 8.5) provides an idea of the types of suppliers participating in such local markets. Sales ranged from 5 to 183 head, the latter a transaction of 125,000 reales. There were more than 75 head of cattle involved in 9 out of 45 sales, and the sellers included three titled nobles and the monastery at Guadalupe; they provided 44% of the cattle bought at the fair and, because of the quality of their livestock, received nearly half of the proceeds.

The fairs, and the government supply agents using them, obviously were a conduit between urban demand and provincial landed elites. The entire livestock business was within a cash context that involved even small stock-raisers and thus provided a common orientation for both landed nobility and the lesser landed elements in this segment of the economy. It also fits with the widespread prevalence of livestock even in farming areas such as the Tierra de Campos and Segovia.⁽⁷¹⁾

There is, however, a suggestive contrast between the regional fairs and the sales at Madrid. The fairs brought relatively modest vendors into contact with official buyers who directed stock to Madrid. This provided provincial elites with an economic link to Madrid that also had a political component, one which took responsibility for risks and costs on the long trip to the final [183]destination. The transactions at Madrid were dominated by commercial middlemen who consolidated and directed livestock privately. Either arrangement was probably viable, but they posed different conditions. Private brokering needed private capital and required rural vendors to adjust to dependence on market arrangements that they were less able to influence, weakening one of the subtle links between provincial elite and traditional government.

Table 8.5. Sales of Cattle at Trujillo Fair, 1798

No. of Cattle Sold	No. of Sellers
37275	10
21-40	16
41-75	10
76 and above	9
Total no. of sellers	45

Scattered granary accounts provide similar valuable information about the people who had wheat to sell and the nature of the wheat market that was within reasonable transport distance from the city. Other accounts document the types of suppliers participating in a long-distance supply network where transfer costs required political intervention to establish the flow of commodities to the urban consumer. Together they provide some insights into the supply milieu of the inner and outer of the three wheat-market zones identified in Chapter 7. Illescas, south of Madrid, has been identified as a grain-marketing center in this study, and we have an account by the agent of the Pósito based in neighboring Getafe in 1785 of purchases in the nearby towns of Villamannque, Estremera, Fuentidueña, and Belinchón (see Table 8.6).⁽⁷²⁾ The size distribution of these transactions confirms that many peasants made occasional small grain sales, but that otherwise the grain trade was concentrated in the hands of a few landlords and labradores ricos.

These figures show an extremely high degree of concentration of disposable surpluses. This concentration is probably much higher than the concentration of landholding, since the small landholders required all but a minuscule share of their crop for their own use, plus tithes, taxes, and rent, and were less likely to be in the market at all. The average sale was 98 fanegas, worth about 4,000 reales at current prices, but half the actual transactions were 30 fanegas or less. At the other extreme, 10% of the transactions, ranging from 10,000 to 80,000 reales, accounted for half the total.

Table 8.6. Grain Sales in Four Towns of New Castile, 1785

Size of Transaction	No. of Sellers
0-20 fanegas	25
21-50	25
51-100	11
101-150	4
151-250	3
251-500	3
2000	1
Total no. of sellers	72

Source: AHN, Consejos, leg. 11470.

This reveals a hierarchy similar to those found in peasant villages everywhere in western Europe.⁽⁷³⁾ The most immediate examples are the sixteenth-century villages of the Montes de Toledo 50 miles south of Madrid, where the wealthiest 20% of landholders controlled almost 50% of the land and over 50% of the harvest.⁽⁷⁴⁾ The distribution in the sixteenth century appears less extreme than the cases we are considering, but by the end of the seventeenth century the inequalities in land distribution had become more extreme and thus more closely approximate our eighteenth-century example.

In the two largest villages, the economic hierarchy appears to parallel a social one. In Fuentidueña, where sales totaled 1,310 fanegas, seven of the eight largest sales were by people with the same patronym (Sánchez) and totaled 958 fanegas. Moreover, they were linked with two matronyms to additional vendors accounting for another 151 fanegas. The situation was similar in Belinchón, where sales totaled 2,779 fanegas: five residents with the patronym Salazar were the five largest vendors and sold a total of 1,500 fanegas. While we cannot know the degree to which these wealthier labradores ricos were really farmers or rentiers, it is probable that they dominated village politics and the management of communal properties. A number of these large vendors merited the honorific Don, but only in the case [185] of Doña Teresa Esteban Martínez, with 2,000 fanegas of wheat at her disposal, can we be reasonably sure of dealing with a rentier landlord.

This pattern of sales suggests that a sizable number of farmers on occasion participated in the market, but that in any given town a slight decline in the quality of the crop restricted potential vendors to a very short list. As the distance to market became greater, the costs inherent in dealing in small quantities restricted the trade to larger producers, leaving the others out of the market.

The above picture is modified slightly by a second set of Pósito accounts. Between January 1 and 15, 1785, the Pósito purchased at its doors 229 shipments of wheat totaling 11,371 fanegas (see Table 8.7). As the maps in Chapter 9 show, most of these came from within 50 miles of the capital, although some of the largest originated in the southeast, where a number of professional transporters resided. The average shipment here was about 50 fanegas, half that of the preceding account, while half of the shipments were less than 41 fanegas. The upper limit reflects the nature of professional transport, which restricted such transactions to the cargo of a large recua (70 mules) or a cuadrilla of 30 carretas.⁽⁷⁵⁾ The number of small shipments suggests villagers with small surpluses taking advantage of slack time in the crop cycle to bring grain (or send it with neighbors) to market. Such small and dispersed quantities and short distances were not interesting to professional transporters; but as an activity marginal to agriculture, it yielded a net benefit to a household as long as the return exceeded the extra costs of travel to market.⁽⁷⁶⁾

These examples suggest that agriculture around Madrid was linked to the urban market in ways that, given the structure of that market, were not conducive to rural change. As every essay on the Spanish countryside (and on peasant villages in most of western Europe) asserts, much of the land was exploited in small plots that gave the peasant only occasional surpluses. Thus a large part of the land and rural population were locked into subsistence farming. The producer most likely to respond to new market incentives was the wealthy peasant who, even in a poor crop year, had a few hundred, or even just a few dozen, bushels of grain to sell. The incentive to expand this part of his economy was, however, limited by the nature of the Madrid market. Moreover, the eighteenth century saw rural population growth that encouraged regional subsistence economies, and was abetted in this by the Crown's encouragement of supply stability via village granaries. The logical outcome was the withdrawal of smaller producers from the market. This also helps [186] explain much of the enclosure we have observed, and possibly also declining yields, as measured by tithes.

Table 8.7. Grain Purchases by the Grain Depot of Madrid, January 1785

Size of Purchase	No. of Sellers
0-20 fanegas	55
21-50	95
51-100	63
101-150	7
151-250	7
251-500	1
Total no. of sellers	228

Source: AHN, Consejos, leg. 11470.

As we have seen, because of the structure of Madrid's economy and distribution of income, even among the Castilian monocultures the choices for profit-motivated response narrowed whenever maritime Spain prospered and the capital grew. Thus, while the English landlord and his tenant farmers could introduce convertible husbandry, forage crops, and new rotations, because their market absorbed the produce, their Castilian counterparts had little option but to extend existing monocultures and stock-raising. Even that response brought tension between the two, and stagnation of alternatives such as viticulture.

At the same time, the labradores ricos could at best follow the Prussian rather than the English model. This implied accumulating grain using the traditional techniques of renting out pastures to farmers, raising rents, manipulating communal lands, and using señorial prerogatives to strengthen rural authority. This attempt to create marketable stocks thus interacted with the development of minifundia as population growth brought division of leaseholds among heirs, further increasing the polarization of village economies.⁽⁷⁷⁾ The village oligarchs of the eighteenth century were obvious participants in this structure of local power, and became more prominent as the landed elite reintegrated in the nineteenth century.⁽⁷⁸⁾ In the region within 75-100 miles of the city, supply commerce was dominated by a private-sector network, and the link between these prosperous labradores and the middlemen of the capital formed another part of the evolving agro-commercial oligarchy of nineteenth-century Spain.

[187] What then of the perennial connections between Madrid and Old Castile? While there are important similarities, individual sales were typically much larger and the sellers more prominent in the Castilian elite. The earliest details come from an account of 1630-31 that combines the activity of a number of purchasing agents with varying degrees of detail. A full third of the 77,624 fanegas of wheat accounted for was bought from the traditional rentier elite: eight titled nobles, two bishoprics, and parts of the Crown's share of Church tithes.⁽⁷⁹⁾ A second account, from 1665, details the purchase of 30,490 fanegas well enough to reveal the size distribution of the transactions. While confined to a smaller area, the Tierra de Campos, it appears to reflect the same pattern as the accounts of 35 years earlier (see Table 8.8).

Excluding two entries that appear to refer to middlemen, 30 vendors provided an average of 872 fanegas of wheat each, while the 5 largest sold half the total, or 15,000 fanegas. More than half of all transactions exceeded 400 fanegas, more than ten times the average size of agent purchases near Madrid. The prominence of señorial and clerical sellers in these two accounts indicates an important link between the señorial regime and urban supply in the seventeenth century.

Accounts from the late eighteenth century indicate that authorities had broadened and deepened their penetration of regional markets. From Olmedo, midway between Valladolid and Segovia, we have a list of transactions dated 1767. The scale of transaction in this case was similar to those of Belinchón and Fuentidueña, although the distance to Madrid was considerably greater. One of the 12 vendors was an untitled absentee, the first and third largest appear to be labradores of the village, four were convents, and two were titled nobles, while only three vendors, including the two smallest, were simply farmers. This was a bad crop year, and the smaller producers have disappeared from the market, leaving only rent recipients and operators of larger farms with marketable surpluses.

The seventeenth-century link between urban supply and landed aristocracy reappears in a fragmentary account extending from 1766 to 1770. The documents record 100-200,000 fanegas of wheat a year, and separately cite large purchases negotiated directly with rentiers who appear to live in Madrid. These transactions include the purchase of 13,370 fanegas of wheat from the Countess of Campo Alange and 5,273 from the Duke of Alba from two harvests; 1,878 fanegas from the Count of Cifuentes in 1770; 3,766 from the Cathedral Chapter of Toledo; and 11,576 from the sequestered Jesuit [188] properties in Old and New Castile.⁽⁸⁰⁾ These are not insignificant transactions, since, at prevailing prices, 13,000 fanegas of wheat were worth over 600,000 reales, more than the annual income of many Spanish grandees.

Table 8.8. Grain Sales in Tierra de Campos, 1665

Size of Transaction	No. of Sellers
0-250 fanegas	9
251-500	9
501-1000	7
1001-2500	4
4000	1
Total no. of sellers	30

Source: AVM, Secretaria, sig. 2-106-28.

The link between urban supply and the señorial regime is further documented in an account of 140,000 fanegas purchased in 1779-81; 90,000 fanegas came from the escusados (ecclesiastical income reserved for the Crown), and 30,000 were sold by 13 titled nobles including the Count of Altamira, the Duke of Ábranles, the Marquis of Almarza, the Duke of Osma, and the king's brother, the Infante Don Luis. Six of the sales were between 2,000-7,800 fanegas, the latter representing 400,000 reales at prevailing prices. It is interesting to note that by the fall of 1781 the price had fallen from 50 to 35 reales per fanega, and there is not a trace of these public-spirited citizens in the accounts.⁽⁸¹⁾

Taken together, this handful of accounts shows the Pósito involved in several exchange networks. The granary itself was a center of a local market for surpluses from the surrounding region, and occasionally used agents to draw upon that source more directly. The central granary purchased ecclesiastic and royal stocks accumulated as tithes and escusados, and negotiated purchases from individual aristocrats resident in Madrid. Finally, the Pósito penetrated the grain market of Old Castile through the use of buying agents who consolidated local supplies and arranged for their shipment to Madrid at government cost. In the 1760's and 1770's, as in the seventeenth century, the larger religious, royal, and noble reserves became prominent whenever grain became scarce.

Judging from surviving accounts, by the end of the 1780's the purchasing system had penetrated more deeply into the rural economy of Old Castile. [189] This is exemplified by the Olmedo account of 1766, but is better illustrated by one final example, an account that details the purchase of 31,800 fanegas by a single agent in the Tierra de Campos in 1788 (see Table 8.9). It includes no titled nobility or absentees, but the 60 vendors included 6 priests and vicars and 35 persons with the honorific Don. The average sale was 530 fanegas, and 50% of sales were larger than 330, implying a sizable farmstead or estate; 14 of the 60 vendors provided 51% of the total, in quantities matching those of all but three or four of the previously cited aristocrats. Only three sales were smaller than 100 fanegas, omitting small farmers like those who reached the Madrid market from its nearby hinterland. A comparison with the accounts from Belinchón and Fuentidueña indicates that the purchasing network in Old Castile touched only those rentiers and farmers who were the economic equivalent of the few labradores ricos at the top of the local hierarchies in our New Castilian examples. Even in the Tierra de Campos, granary of Old Castile, only 4 of 27 towns produced more than three transactions on that scale, and one of those was Villalón, a regional market where 20% of all the transactions in the account took place.

This pattern is verified by the economic structure of the villages in the area. In five villages near Villalón, the distribution of sales is clearly reflected in the distribution of access to land: 37% of the land was actually owned by farmers, 75% of all farms had less than 5 hectares, and 88% less than 10. A family of five, allowing for seed, tithes, rent, and bread-grain, required about 25 hectares to be self-sufficient in grain and 30 to supply other necessities as well. Only one in ten farms actually exceeded 20 hectares, and only a few-- typically one per village--could yield 300 fanegas for the market in an ordinary crop year. Under these conditions, small farms were forced into a marginal viticulture to generate cash income. The larger grain sales inevitably [190] represent not only the crop of the seller himself but grain acquired as rents, tithes, and privately owned tercias ceded by the Crown.⁽⁸²⁾

Table 8.9. Grain Sales in Old Castile, 1788

Size of Transaction	No. of Sellers
0-100 fanegas	3
101-200	13
201-500	23
501-1000	11
1001-1500	9
1900	1
Total no. of sellers	60

Source: AHN, Consejos, leg. 11470.

IV. Conclusion

With these findings, we get not only a confirmation of our general perception of wealth and land distribution of Castilian villages, and of the relationship of the rentier elements to the countryside, but also an idea of the specific mechanisms that channeled rural surpluses into urban markets, particularly that of Madrid. For livestock, two parallel systems had evolved, one in which private middlemen used their own networks to deliver meat animals directly to the city, another in which public authorities (often the same purveyors operating with government concessions) linked regional livestock fairs with urban demand. Under these arrangements, the herds and flocks of graziers of all sizes were integrated into a Madrid-oriented market network.

For wheat, transport difficulties created a more complex hierarchy of networks. Within economically feasible distances of Madrid, very small to very large producers routinely brought their surpluses to market themselves, with the help of neighbors, or by hiring professional transporters. Any given town, however, contained only a handful of farmers with farms large enough to allow regular participation on a scale that made the returns an important part of the household or village economy. The structure of surviving accounts and the discussions surrounding the deregulation of the grain trade make it clear that the bakers and millers of the city obtained a large share of their supplies from a private network that tapped these sources inside a radius of 75-100 miles of Madrid.

To attract supplies from beyond that radius, other arrangements were needed. A corps of purchasing agents, similar to those for the meat supply, traveled throughout Castile buying up the output of the two or three major farmers and rentiers in each village and dealing with resident brokers in the principal market towns. There is little evidence that this interregional system touched the small peasant who, if he entered a market, contributed to a local network analogous to the one around Madrid. Some of the participants in the government's system, like the arrieros of Sangarcia, used the connections they had discovered in government service to develop private channels for bringing grain from Old Castile to the Madrid market. At the same time, the Pósito dealt directly with important rentiers to mobilize the supplies they had accumulated.

The wheat and cattle transactions we have outlined were part of a complex [191] economic network, some of which was market-driven, some of which had important political components. In the nineteenth century, many of the overtly political components were eliminated, allowing greater latitude for market response and price speculation. In practice, this process was well under way in the last half of the eighteenth century and did not represent a sudden and arbitrary change. The "liberalization" of the interior market shifted risks and costs from the government to the consumer, and depersonalized the relationship of the rural elite to the urban market and the state, but did not modify the underlying economic structure of the interior.

The effect of the mid-nineteenth-century land sales on this economy has been the subject of much discussion. Some new landowners from the towns did appear in the countryside. The degree to which this is seen to represent a revolutionary insertion of capitalism into agriculture reflects the inclinations of the researcher. In the Tierra de Campos, about 28% of all land changed hands, creating a new group of absentee landlords and a few large fincas that were connected with the evolution of caciquismo. In the district of Olmedo, northwest of Segovia, 25% of the land changed hands between 1820 and 1891. A third of that was acquired by absentee rentiers or speculators, but 55% was bought by the better-off labradores in the area. The actual cultivated plots were seldom reorganized and averaged one acre in size in 1750, again in 1879, and even in 1950. In the province of Valladolid the pattern was similar, and the purchasers of land were either the peasants themselves or the rentiers, large farmers, or businessmen already involved with agriculturally oriented commerce. Very few new fortunes and only a handful of major new landlords appeared.⁽⁸³⁾

Seen in a broader context, some old absentees were replaced by other new ones, who restructured some farms and forced up some rents. Yet absenteeism was already common, and rural labor and potential tenants were plentiful anyway, so the only real result was a marginally different matrix for the rural elite and a modest increase in familiar forms of rural misery.⁽⁸⁴⁾ It is a choice example of how profit-maximizing attitudes can lead to a freezing of rural production because of the nature of the overall market.⁽⁸⁵⁾ The situation favored the few who controlled farms of significant size and those who could increase rents and control tithes and commons land. The process may even have been more pronounced before the disentailment of the 1830's, since [192] under Ferdinand VII (1808-33) enclosures continued apace, but it favored those who controlled traditional señorial power in the countryside.⁽⁸⁶⁾

Subsequently, the competing rentiers and labradores ricos, having shared out the lands of the churches and municipalities, merged into an integrated rural hierarchy that dominated Castilian politics.⁽⁸⁷⁾ This is reflected in the underlying consistency of policy on agricultural tariffs--the Liberals of 1820, Ferdinand VII, the Moderados, and the Restoration of the 1870's all used tariffs to protect Castilian agriculture at the expense of the towns.⁽⁸⁸⁾ This landed class participated in the urban supply system in various ways, even as the middlemen of the supply system developed rural assets and connections. The evolving landed class drifted steadily into the cities and absenteeism, but the shift to Liberal economics and property law did not make landowners bourgeois or capitalist--that process had long since begun. The "bourgeois revolution" is a concept that stands for the rationalization of the marketing of surpluses extracted from the countryside. The economic life of the countryside itself resisted more than marginal modifications through much of the nineteenth century.⁽⁸⁹⁾

All of these processes explain the eternal lament that there was no domestic market in Castile and that wrong-headed policies prevented one from developing. In fact, the liberalization of landholding and control served initially to aggravate the narrowness of the market-oriented segment of each village by keeping the poor out of the market altogether, encouraging a concentration of landholding. This facilitated the movement of the families able to participate in a national market to the very city that restricted such a national market as it grew and prospered. The rentiers and labradores ricos who entered the long-distance market under the Old Regime were also drawn into nineteenth-century politics and into a milieu in which their prosperity depended on Madrid both as consumer and as maker of economic policy. The liberalization of property was a prerequisite for rural economic change, but until transport was modernized the structure of the rural economy remained that of the Old Regime.

Notes for Chapter 8

1. The limits are inherent in the light seasonal rainfall. To avoid summer dessication, crops in Old Castile had to be sown in late fall, but only after the autumn rains. If the rains were late, the growing season extended into hot, dry weather and crops were poor. The long-term Malthusian cycle is typified by Segovia, which expanded 1530-1580, stagnated 1580-1600, declined 1600-1650, stagnated 1650-1700, expanded 1700-1760, and stagnated 1760-1814. Total production in the late sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries was remarkably similar. See Angel García Sanz, Desarollo y crisis del Antiguo Régimen en Castilla la Vieja: Economía y sociedad en tierras de Segovia de 1500 a 1814, pp. 24, 75.

2. E.g., the lists of local markets and fairs in the Guia de Forasteros for any year after 1740.

3. José Luis L. Arangurén comments in Moral y sociedad: La moral social española en el siglo XIX (1970), p. 40, on the profound isolation of the peasantry. Antonio Flores, in Ayer, hoy y mañana, vol. 1: Ayer, o la sociedad de la fe en 1800 (1892), pp. 175-184, describes a trip from Madrid to Salamanca: it was distasteful, uncomfortable, slow, and dangerous and required armed escorts.

4. Pedro Romero de Sous, in La población española, pp. 27-28, summarizes this pattern in the seventeenth century, as part of a strongly Marxist analysis.

5. Edward W. Fox, in History in Geographic Perspective, p. 29, discusses this kind of monetized regional self-sufficiency.

6. David R. Ringrose, Transportation, maps.

7. A quick review of any of the 45 volumes of Eugenio Larruga's Memorias políticas y económicas sobre los frutos, comercio, fábricas y minas de España (1787-1800) confirms this dispersion of regionally oriented handicrafts. In the words of Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, in España hace un siglo, pp. 8-11: "La mayor parte de la producción agraria tenía por destino la satisfacción del consumo de la gran masa rural, en tanto que solo una proporción pequeña entraba en el mercado."

8. Ringrose, Transportation, p. 85.

9. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Informe de ley agraria (1968), pp. 176-177; Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, El crisis del Antiguo Régimen en Guipúzcoa (1976), pp. 41-51.

10. The mechanisms are illustrated by several writers, notably Sánchez-Albornoz, in Los precios agrícolas, vol. 1, pp. 35, 39-59, who documents recurrences as late as 1882.

11. Writing in 1927, long after completion of the Liberal reforms, José Ortega y Gasset--in La redención de las provincias, pp. 25, 48--still saw isolation as the basic problem of the countryside, commenting: "Hay que remozar a España. En todos sentidos. Hay que hacer caminitos relucientes por todas las glebas, hay que hacer que se afeitar los curas y que los radicales de pueblo digan menos palabras inanes, hay que hacer innumerables cosas mas." See also Alvaro Flórez Estrada's complaints a century earlier in Luis Alfonso Martínez Cachero, Alvaro Flórez Estrada (1961), p. 30.

12. See Manuel Colmeiro's comments in Historia de la economía política en España, vol. 2, pp. 846-847.

13. Romero de Solis, La población, pp. 111-112, describes this dependence upon local production and high transport costs. Valentín Cabero Diéguez, in Evolución y estructura urbana de Astorga (1973), pp. 44-45, shows the limited ability of transport to stimulate a regional economy. García Sanz, in Desarrollo y crisis, pp. 24,177, gives a succinct statement of this situation.

14. Aranguren, in Moral y sociedad, p. 40, comments that land was as much an instrument of power as of wealth.

15. The classic statement on land control is in Carmelo Viñas y Mey, El problema de la tierra en la España de los siglos XVI-XVII (1941). See also Helen Nader, "Nobility as Borrowers and Lenders," p. 14, and the comments on absenteeism, tierras de propios, etc., in Colmeiro, Historia, vol. 2, pp. 683-685, 713. For a detailed case study, see La economía del Antiguo Régimen: El Señorío de Buitrago (1974), esp. pp. 143-181. Also see Helen Nader, "Nobility," p. 8, and her "Noble Income in Sixteenth-Century Castile: The Case of the Marquises of Mondéjar, 1480-1580" (1977).

There is controversy over the collection of land rents. Pastures and vineyards were usually rented for money, farmland for part of the commodity produced. Given the interaction of prices and control of marketable supplies in directing the benefits implied by conjunctural trends, this point needs more study. For apparently typical rental patterns in Old and New Castile: AHN, Clero, Jesuítas, legs. 27-1, 2, 3, 4; 38-6, 7; 67-1-10; and 215-3.

16. García Sanz, Desarrollo y crisis, pp. 347-356.

17. In eighteenth-century Segovia, the take was about 30% of agricultural output, 80% of that in commodities. In sixteenth-century New Castile, it was somewhat higher, but the role of money was greater: ibid., pp. 383-385.

18. The terminology is that of Sir John Hicks, in his discussion of "revenue economies" in A Theory of Economic History, pp. 9-24 and 81-100.

19. AVM, Secretaria, sig. 2-122-1. See also Ringrose, "Madrid y Castilla, 1560-1850," p. 95.

20. Nader, "Nobility," pp. 14-15.

21. Romero de Sous, in La población, pp. 113-115, comments on the increasing use of such accumulations for speculation during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For a contemporaneous assumption about its prevalence, see Jovellanos, Informe de ley agraria, p. 124. The definition of landed elites used here is that suggested by Richard Herr in "Spain," pp. 98-102. It was not just the rural elite which took advantage of such speculation, since the controlling elite of seventeenth-century Valencia exploited the city granary in the same manner; see James Casey, The Kingdom of Valencia, p. 172.

22. See José Gentil da Silva, En Espagne, pp. 1-57; Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 1, pp. 293-294, 404-408; Noel Salomon, La campagne de Nouvelle Castile a la fin du XVIe siecle.

23. Braudel, La Méditerranée, vol. 1, pp. 370-371; Vicens Vives, Manual, pp. 301-302. Credible estimates for the 1590's run as high as 6.5 million: Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad española del siglo XVII, p. 113. The presence of the trend, whatever the absolute figures, is documented by the Relaciones Topográficas of the 1570's, in which 234 of 370 villages responding in New Castile indicated noticeable population growth. See Gentil da Silva, En Espagne, pp. 21-22; Salomon, La campagne de Nouvelle Castille, p. 44.

24. On population density, see José Gentil da Silva, pp. 19-26, and Salomon, pp. 42-49. On reduction of the growing season, see Bennassar, Valladolid; and Braudel, La Méditerranée, vol. 1, pp. 245-252. Degradation of the soil has been suggested as a cause of decline. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the areas near Madrid were described as having good ground water, truck gardening, and forest cover. By mid-seventeenth century, the area was described as wretched, barren, and dusty. See Jose Deleito y Piñuelo, Solo Madrid es Corte, pp. 69-70. On forests, see J. M. Houston, The Western Mediterranean World (1964), pp. 114-115; and H. Hopfner, "La evolución de los bosques de Castilla la Vieja en tiempos históricos" (1954).

25. Jean Vilar, Literatura y economía (1973).

26. García Sanz, Desarrollo, pp. 58-59.

27. Gonzalo Anes, Las crises agrarias, p. 116; Valentina Fernández Vargas--in La población de León en el siglo XVI (1968), pp. 135, 163--shows that León declined 30% between 1591 and 1646; Gentil da Silva, p. 110; Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad del siglo XVII, p. 113.

28. On the general situation: Braudel, La Méditerranée, vol. I, p. 370; Vicens Vives, Manual, p. 301; Gentil da Silva, pp. 106-111. Bartolomé Bennassar, Recherches sur les grandes épidemies dans le nord de l'Espagne á la fin du XVIe siécle, pp. 62-63, and Domínguez Ortiz, Siglo XVII, pp. 69, and 81, consider that the plague was serious. On the other hand, a contemporary chronicler, Antonio Rodríguez León Pinelo, in Anales de Madrid, 1598-1621, passes it off with the comment that "Este año [1599] pico algo la peste in Castilla y en esta villa. . ." with brief descriptions of precautions used.

29. Domínguez Ortiz, Siglo XVII, pp. 90-95; see also Chapter 3 above.

30. Carla Rahn Philips, "Ciudad Real in the Seventeenth Century" (paper presented to the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, 1972).

31. Thomas K. Niehaus, "Population Problems and Land Use in the Writings of the Spanish Arbitristas," p. 44. See also Ramón Garande, Carlos V y sus banqueros, vol. 1 (1965), p. 60; Anes, Las crises agrarias, p. 459.

32. Domínguez Ortiz, Siglo XVII, pp. 124-126.

33. Michael Weisser, "Crime and Subsistence: The Peasants of the Tierra of Toledo" (Ph. D. diss., 1972), p. 53, and "The Demography of the Heartland of New Castile, 1550-1700" (manuscript, 1974), p. 6.

34. Segovia is a good example; see García Sanz, Desarrollo, pp. 63-64.

35. Vicente Llombart Rosa, " 'Ley agraria' and 'Sociedades de agricultura' " (1976), p. 62; La Rema Nacional, pp. 47-48; Francisco Bustelo García del Real, "Algunos reflexiones sobre la población española de principios del siglo XVIII" and "La población española en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII."

36. In Segovia province, the output of bread-grains per capita declined 40% from 1600 to 1800. This was partly compensated for by increases in livestock and lesser grains, but the decline is striking; see García Sanz, Desarrollo, pp. 84-85, 110-115.

37. Ibid., pp. 63-64, 169.

38. AHN, Consejos, leg. 11463.

39. Anes, Las crises agrarias, pp. 155-160, 430-431, 465-466.

40. Ibid., pp. 193-198, 480-481. A second example, the town of La Solana, saw its seed/ yield ratio fall from 1/6 in 1720-1765 to only 1/4.5 in 1765-1807. Similar trends are documented by García Sanz, pp. 156-159, for Segovia, where late eighteenth-century yields were not different from those of the late sixteenth century.

41. Llombart Rosa, "Ley agraria," p. 62. On productivity, see Anes, Las crises agrarias, pp. 151-157. Similar observations have been made about the Tierra de Campos in the late eighteenth century; see Peña Sánchez, Crisis Rural, p. 95. In Segovia, fallows were allowed to stand longer to increase grazing, even though it reduced absorption of moisture. The two-field pattern was sometimes broken with a quick-growing fodder crop. This allowed some growth in total output, but did not prevent the decline in per-capita output; see Garcia Sanz, pp. 25-27, 218.

42. There are reports of persistent depopulation near Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo, and in Extremadura and Soria. Many compare the situation in the 1760's and 1770's with that ofthe late seventeenth century; see Anes, Las crises agrarias, pp. 142-144, 166-185, 462. Birth and death trends for 8 towns, 2 in New Castile and 6 in Old Castile, suggest an increasing population base in one town for each region, a decreasing base in one for each region, and no discernible change in the remaining 4.

43. Already in 1750, beginning date of the preceding sample, there were numerous complaints by graziers about these enclosures: AHN, Consejos, leg. 11450; García Sanz, pp. 148-154.

44. This is a little-studied topic, and may be another aspect of subsistence enclosure. In the 1750's, intermittent rural food shortages become noticeable, forcing towns to buy grain, committing income from their propios to pay the necessary loans. One source names 33 towns, many quite substantial, forced to this by the crisis of 1753: AHN, Consejos, leg. 11489.

45. Based on Anes, Las crises agrarias, p. 459; the actual registers in AHN, Consejos, leg. 4184; and personal notes from that source provided by Professor Anes. The problem of landlord adjustment to the market needs more study--since, while it may have been marginal income for most, examples keep appearing. Conversely, in Segovia, rental terms were unchanged through all the conjunctural shifts between 1500 and 1800. Moreover, the government of the eighteenth century tended to protect the peasants in the courts, while landlords complained of fragmentation of leaseholds and the difficulty of collecting rent; see Garcia Sanz, pp. 296,308-309,319.

46. Anes, Las crises agrarias, pp. 401-422.

47. Jacques Barbier. "Peninsular Finance and Colonial Trade: The Dilemma of Charles IV's Spain," pp. 4-8.

48. These are part of a six-item list in Anes' discussion of the grain trade in Las crises agrarias, pp. 340-350.

49. Gonzalo Anes Álvarez, "Los pósitos en la España del siglo XVIII" (1968), pp. 50-54.

50. Peña Sánchez, Crisis rural, p. 91.

51. Consumption was 50-60,000,000 bushels, assuming 5 bushels per capita per year. Madrid itself consumed around 1.1 million bushels annually. William J. Callahan, in "Caridad, sociedad y economía en el siglo XVIII" (1978), suggests that the urban unrest of the early nineteenth century is connected with the dismantling of this welfare system.

52. Romero de Sous, La población, pp. 111-115.

53. Peña Sánchez, Crisis rural, p. 83; García Sanz, p. 177; Arlóla, El Señorío de Buitrago, pp. 117-123.

54. Phillips, "Spanish Wool Exports," table; Antonio Malilla Tascón, ed., Balanza de comercio exterior en 1795, pp. 7, 89.

55. Peña Sánchez, Crisis rural, p. 79. Helen Nader made the same comments about the province of Guadalajara at a seminar at the University of California, San Diego, in 1979. Another little-explored aspect is the seaport demand for meat. Grain was readily imported by sea, but livestock came from the interior. Seventeenth-century Valencia, for example, consumed 80,000 sheep from the meseta every year; see Casey, The Kingdom of Milencia, p. 79.

56. Ringrose, Transportation, map 3.

57. Antonio Mejide Pardo, Economía marítima de la Galicia cantábrica en el siglo XVIII (1971), pp. 103-104; Pedro Antonio Sánchez, La economía gallega (1973, written in the 1790's), pp. 24, 127-142.

58. In 1786, military contractors relied on the yield to the government of the gracia y escusado, a resource that had often been a back-up reserve for the Madrid bread supply. The contract for 1786 involved 200-240,000 fanegas of wheat (14.5 million daily rations of bread) and 340,000 fanegas of barley. Only a part of this was to be drawn from Castile: Archivo del Banco de España, Memorias de la Quinta Junta General of the Bank of San Carlos, December 1786, leg. 454. See also Capella and Malilla, Los Cinco Gremios, pp. 56, 197-201.

59. Mejide Pardo, Economía marítima de Galicia, p. 106. Essentially the same pattern appears in seventeenth-century Valencia; see Casey, p. 79.

60. Vicente Palacio Atard, El comercio de Castilla y el puerto de Santander en el siglo XVIII (1959), p. 149; Archivo de la Sociedad Económica de Madrid, leg. 247-16.

61. Peña Sánchez, Crisis rural, pp. 102-103. Miguel de Terán, in "Santander," pp. 746-757, indicates that flour exports ran 12,250-25,000 tons between 1818 and the 1840's.

62. The late eighteenth century saw the merino strain acclimatized in France, Germany, and England. England cut its demand by two-thirds in the 30 years after 1795; see Jordi Nadal Oiler, El fracaso de la revolución industrial en España (1975), pp. 78-79.

63. F. Garrido, España contemporánea (1865), vol. 1, pp. 490-491.

64. Capella and Malilla, in Los Cinco Gremios Mayores, summarize their early development and commercial interests on pp 42-43 and document their growing sophistication on pp. 210-215.

65. García Sanz, pp. 72-73, 182-184; see also Anes, Las crises agrarias, pp. 340-350. This parallels the development, after 1750, of peninsula-wide luxury trade by the arrieros of León; see José Luis Martín Galindo, "Evolución agrícola y ganadería en Maragatería" (1957), p. 118.

66. García Sanz says something like this, on pp. 191-193 and 326, in attempting to show the presence of a Castilian bourgeoisie which could help explain the "bourgeois revolution" of the nineteenth century. He comes closer than most to grasping the evolution of the Madrid-based network of relationships involved, but is hampered by his focus on events in the provinces.

67. Peter Janke, Mendizabal y la instauración de la monarquía constitucional en España (1974), pp. 5-9.

68. Nadal Oiler, El fracaso, pp. 57-67 and 84; the evidence on this is sketchy.

69. There are detailed accounts of purchases of the total supply for the year running from mid-1797 to mid-1789 in AHN, Consejos, leg. 6785.

70. Ibid., leg. 6786.

71. In Buitrago, for example, aside from the absentee Infantados, 17 stock-raisers shared 600,000 reales from the sale of meat and wool outside the district: Artola, El Señorío de Buitrago, pp. 134-137. For another impressive list of flocks, see Marqués del Saltillo, "Ganaderos sorianos del siglo XVIII" (1952), pp. 387-389.

72. AHN, Consejos, leg. 11470.

73. Spanish variants include seventeenth-century Valencia, where, beneath the señorial elite, villages were controlled by a few labradores with relatively large holdings. There the tendency had been enhanced by sale of morisco lands. In livestock-oriented Buitrago, 5% of resident families received half of all income; see Casey, pp. 44-45, and Arlóla, El Señorío de Buitrago, pp. 134-141. And in a transaction involving wine, a single labrador paid 10,000 reales per year to rent sequestered Jesuit vineyards near Alcalá de Henares: AHN, Clero. Jesuítas, leg. 215-3.

74. Michael R. Weisser, The Peasants of the Montes (1976), pp. 37-53, and personal letters. The parallel is close, since 70-80% of harvest value was in grain in this area.

75. Such convoys were common, but the upper limit of a shipment was 250-300 fanegas: Ringrose, Transportation, pp. 58-68,

76. Ibid., p. 122.

77. García Sanz, p. 262.

78. Richard Herr, "Spain."

79. Because of the aggregate nature of many of the account entries, this is only a minimum figure for participation by rentier landowners and institutions: derived from AVM, Contaduría, sigs. 2-103-1 and 3-580-1. Among the key figures were the Count of Grajal, the Marquis of Bayona, the Count of Villanueva de la Cañada, and the Bishoprics of Falencia and Valladolid.

80. AHN, Consejos, leg. 6775-26, 52, 58; see also Anes, Las crises agrarias, p. 362.

81. AHN, Consejos, leg. 6775-3.

82. Peña Sánchez, Crisis rural, pp. 39, 48, 52-56, 66-68, 70-71.

83. Germán Rueda Hernánz, La desamortización de Mendizábal en Valladolid, 1836-1853 (1980), pp. xlv, 60,204,219-220, and 229, and "La desamortización del siglo XIX en una zona de Castilla la Vieja" (1976), pp. 206, 227; see also Richard Herr, "La vente des propriétés de mainmorte en Espagne, 1798-1808" (1974).

84. Peña Sánchez, Crisis rural, pp. 99-101.

85. Robert Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development," pp. 45-46.

86. See Fierre Ponsot, "Revolution dans les campagnes espagnoles au XIXe siécle: Les désamortissements" (1972), pp. 107, 114; and Sánchez-Albornoz, España hace un siglo, pp. 18-19.

87. Richard Herr, "Spain"; and Miguel Artola, Antiguo Régimen y revolución liberal (1978), pp. 117-118, 151, 199-305.

88. Sánchez-Albornoz, Los precios agrícolas, vol. I, pp. 35-59; Anes, Las crises agrarias, pp. 434-448.

89. Herr, "Spain," pp. 108-111