[57] In addition to its own common property, the Castilian town often shared common rights on certain lands, or other property, in a form of intercommunal use. It is a bit surprising to see the widespread existence of intermunicipal communalism in Castile, where there has long been a notorious emphasis on the patria chica - local rather than national loyalty. Many towns adamantly refused to allow outsiders to use their common lands or even the baldíos under their jurisdiction. For example, in 1543 the town of Villaconejos (Madrid) confiscated some land occupied by a priest who was a vecino of Ciempozuelos, a village some eight miles down the road. The priest had purchased the land in good faith from a vecino of Villaconejos. Actually, however, he had only bought occupancy rights to the property, because it was described as being baldío y concegil (common, in other words). In any case, the clergyman lodged a suit to recover his property. The suit was eventually resolved in 1550 by the Chancillería (Supreme Tribunal) of Valladolid, which ruled against the priest. In its successful arguments, the town claimed that it had never at any time permitted outsiders to occupy its common lands, even though they had purchased them from a vecino of the place who did have occupancy rights. ⁽¹⁾

Such prejudice, and even hostility against outsiders, was widespread in Castile, but it coexisted with a remarkable intercommunalism and intermunicipal cooperation. Intercommunalism had its origin during the Reconquest, when lands were used in common by several settlements in the jurisdiction of a powerful city, or in the zone given to a military commander, bishop, or lord. The settlements, later growing into towns, had some commons that were reserved exclusively for the inhabitants of that particular place, but there were other commons that were shared by the inhabitants of two or more places. Throughout Castile in the sixteenth century [58] there existed intermunicipal commons that extended to veritable federations of towns. The lands that were common to inhabitants of one town were clearly distinguished from those common to the intermunicipal union (typically called a comunidad or a comunidad de villa [or ciudad] y Tierra by sixteenth-century Castilians, but usually referred to as a mancomunidad by modern historians) (Salomon 1964: 143). Belonging to a large intercommunal union could be an important advantage, and the inhabitants of member towns were fully conscious of the fact. When asked where he was from, a person would routinely include not only the name of his village, but also would add that he was a vecino of a certain Tierra where he had intercommunal rights, particularly if it had to do with a prestigious city. For instance, in 1542 a resident of the village of Villaureña (Zamora) identified himself as 'a native of the nearby town of La Bóveda, and a vecino of Villaureña and of the Tierra of the city of Toro'. ⁽²⁾

Some places followed the custom of holding a yearly ceremony to reaffirm their membership in the intermunicipal union to which they belonged. For example, the councilmen of the city of Osma and of the towns of Gormaz and Santisteban (all in Soria province) met on 1 May of each year in the village of Olmeda, on the outskirts of Osma. There they attended mass together, and before leaving the church they solemnly reconfirmed and swore to uphold their intermunicipal common rights. ⁽³⁾

Amando Represa, the director of the Archive of Simancas, has calculated (1979) that in the part of Old Castile comprising the present provinces of Soria, Burgos, Valladolid, Segovia, and Avila, there were as many as 48 comunidades de villa y Tierra embracing 1,648 villages in the late thirteenth century. Some were small associations of only five or six villages, there were medium-sized ones such as Medina del Campo, with 50 villages, and some were truly enormous. The largest were headed by the cities of Soria (with 238 villages), Segovia (204), and Avila (305). The intermunicipal community of Soria occupied 2,666 square kilometers - an area larger than the present province of Vizcaya. Although by the late sixteenth century seventy of the Sorian villages had become depopulated, the others had absorbed their inhabitants, and the union as a whole had grown enormously in population and in strength. And in the mountains of Asturias and León there existed numerous large intermunicipal unions, many of which survived well into the twentieth century. For [59] some villages, the intercommunal lands were of paramount importance, for they had no commons for their own exclusive use.

It should not be thought that intermunicipal communal unions were peculiar to Old Castile: they were also important in the present provinces of Madrid, Guadalajara, Toledo, and Cuenca (Salomon 1964: 143-4). And in Badajoz province there was a huge intercommunal area measuring 9 by 7.5 leagues. The soil of the region was ill-suited for cultivation, but it was excellent pastureland. This area, which was included in the territory of the Order of Alcántara, had nineteen towns in it who shared pasture rights in various dehesas (Casco 1961: 245-7). The other military orders also sponsored the creation of intermunicipal communities, many of them quite extensive. There were many instances of such groupings in the Campo de Calatrava district of the province of Ciudad Real, and in the lands of the Order of Santiago (Quirós 1965: 207-8; Merino 1915: 294-5).

The largest of the intermunicipal unions were formidable indeed, and needed to be organized in a way that would protect the interests of their members. The administrative center was a city or a town, which served as the nucleus of a group of free villages. These were typically organized into districts called cuartos, sexmos, or ochavos (suggesting a division into four, six, or eight), depending upon the size of the community (Valdeavellano 1968: 542-4). For example, the city of Soria and its Tierra formed an intercommunal association comprising over 150 towns and villages in the sixteenth century. The territory was divided into five sexmos (notwithstanding the fact that the name literally means 'six'), or rural districts, which roughly corresponded to geographical factors. The pine forest zone, for instance, comprised one sexmo. The intermunicipal community was governed by a junta comunera (intercommunal council) made up of an elected president called the procurador síndico general, five elected representatives (procuradores or sexmeros) from the five sexmos, and an appointed inspector (fiel), consulting attorney (abogado asesor), and scrivener (escribano). For the election of the intercommunal council representatives, each sexmo was divided into subdistricts called cuadrillas. On a rotating basis, the various cuadrillas elected the representative for their particular sexmo. The representative, who had to be a vecino of one of the villages of the cuadrilla whose turn it was to hold the election, was chosen by general vote for a two-year term. The five sexmo representatives thus chosen, in turn elected the [60] president (procurador síndico general) of the union, who served a two year term and was chosen by alternation between the five sexmos, so that each sexmo would have the presidency for two years during every ten-year period. The inspector, attorney, and scrivener of the council were appointed by the elected officials. The council thus constituted would oversee the administration of the intercommunal property of the association, and would place guards to enforce its ordinances regarding the property's use. It is significant that the president and the inspector had the right to attend the council meetings of the city of Soria, where they had a voice and vote. But the intercommunal council should not be confused with the urban council - they were distinct institutions (Represa 1979).

Intermunicipal commons were of several types. Some were limited to the use of the baldíos and to reciprocal derrota de mieses rights on each other's stubble fields. Others included (or were restricted to) pasture rights in the fellow member town's dehesas. For instance, the villages of Cardenete and Yemeda (Cuenca) shared the use of certain pastures for their work animals. And the towns of Cazorla and La Iruela (Jaén) shared about 2,000 fanegas of pasture lands. Map 2 shows the arrangement of the commons and intermunicipal commons of the villages of Gerena and El Garrobo (Sevilla). Gerena had the exclusive use of three dehesas (i); El Garrobo enjoyed the sole rights to one dehesa and an ejido (5 and 6); and the two villages shared a large dehesa (4) astride the boundary between the two. ⁽⁴⁾

The most widespread intercommunal rights were pasture rights, but there existed also many arable commons of an intercommunal nature. For example, in the encomienda of Mohernando (Guadalajara) there were over 13,000 fanegas of intercommunal arable lands for the use of the vecinos of the town of Mohernando and the villages of Humanes, Robledillo de Mohernando, Razbona, and Cerezo de Mohernando (Vassberg 1974 394). And all the villages of the region called the Tierra del Vino (province of Zamora) shared their arable tierras entradizas. The phrase rejas vueltas was frequently used to describe reciprocal tillage rights. As a matter of fact, this phrase, which literally means 'turnabout plowing', came to be so closely identified with the idea of intercommunalism that it was even used -- quite illogically -- to describe reciprocal pasture privileges, even though pacer a rejas vueltas referred exclusively to livestock grazing rights, and had nothing whatever to do with plows. Many intercommunal arable lands were exploited through rozas in the monte. [61] And arable rights were frequently included along with pasture and other rights. A much-used formula to describe the broader intercommunal rights was repeated in 1534 by the town of Campo de Criptana (of the Order of Santiago, province of Ciudad Real) with regard to the common lands it shared with nearby Alcázar de San Juan. It spoke of 'el derecho de romper e labrar y quemar y roçar y pastar y abrevar' (the right to plow and farm and burn and clear and pasture and water). ⁽⁵⁾

Intercommunal privileges often were broadened also to include the right to use the common montes. Such montes that could be used both for firewood and for pasture were in some places described by the [62] phrase de corte y diente, literally meaning 'of cutting and tooth'. In 1569 a royal agent wrote to the crown about an intercommunal monte system in Talamanca de Jarama and its Tierra (an area lying astride the border of the provinces of Madrid and Guadalajara), which included El Casar, Valdepiélagos, Valdetorres, Fuente El Saz, and other villages. He reported that the common lands there were called comuniegas 'because the town of Talamanca and villages of its Tierra all comprise one community, and a single entity, and they have no distinct boundaries between them, for what belongs to one town belongs to them all, with regard to montes and pastures and all benefits'. It should be said parenthetically that the term comuniegas, despite the implication of the words of this royal agent, was not widely used to describe intercommunal lands. Sometimes the mutual monte privileges were restricted to certain types of common rights. After a squabble over reciprocal common rights between the town of Zarahizejo and the city of Trujillo (Cáceres) it was decided that there would be no mutual common rights to cut firewood or lumber, or to hunt and fish in the montes, but that mutual pasture rights (including for acorns) would be respected. ⁽⁶⁾

In some places the season for the use of an intercommunal monte took on a carnivalesque atmosphere. For example, the town of Las Mesas, a place with 230 vecinos in the province of Cuenca, had a valuable acorn-rich monte that was common to a number of surrounding villages. According to the Relaciones, in some years the people of these neighboring villages would gather around the monte two weeks before the opening of the acorn season. They would build huts and set up camp there as if they were at home, with their women working at their spinning wheels, or sewing, and it was reported that one woman even gave birth to a child during one of these waiting periods (Salomon 1964: 142-3 Hoyos 1947: 26-7).

Amando Represa (1979: 15-16) has written about a highly interesting intercommunal association of foresters called the Hermandad de los Pinares, or the Concejos del Pinar. It comprised two villages in the Tierra of Soria and five from the Merindad de Santo Domingo de Silos (Burgos province). The meetings of the association were held in Canicosa (one of the villages in Burgos) and were attended by elected representatives (procuradores) from each village in the association, who were often the alcaldes of the villages. By the late fifteenth century the Hermandad was already a venerable institution. The organization directly exploited and marketed timber, using its [63] own carts (carretería), which reached the cities of Burgos, Valladolid, Palencia, León, and Zamora, among others. The villagers of the Hermandad did well: a document from the 1480s characterized them as 'abundantly wealthy men'. And the vecinos of those same villages were still quite prosperous in the mid-twentieth century, by virtue of continuing the communal system of the local pine forests, although in a modified form.

Consider how complicated the communitarian system could be: a village in the Hermandad de los Pinares, a lumbering intermunicipal union, could also belong to the intermunicipal Tierra of Soria, which conferred intercommunal pasture and other rights. The same village probably also had community lands exclusively of its own, and it is likely that there were some tierras baldías within its access as well. Private property coexisted with all these various and sometimes overlapping forms of community property, but was itself subject to communal exploitation through the derrota de mieses and other practices.

And it should be emphasized that the communitarian system existed in seigneurial towns as well as in royal towns. The lords who had jurisdiction over towns were obliged to respect their communal rights. Not all lords did so with equal enthusiasm, of course. Many places, in fact, had to struggle constantly with their lords to preserve their commons. But in general, the lords must have been constrained by custom to respect the system, for fear of losing their subject population through emigration to other places with more attractive common privileges. Throughout the sixteenth century the revenue starved Castilian crown raised money for its treasury by selling seigneurial jurisdictional rights to many of its towns. But as the formerly royal municipalities fell under the seigneurial system they did not lose their common privileges. The new lords were obliged to recognize the existing communal practices. Sometimes the contract between crown and lord-to-be specifically called for the continuation of the traditional community rights. For example, the document conveying to Don Antonio de Luna the seigneurial jurisdiction over Huétor-Tájar (Granada) declared that the transfer of jurisdiction would in no way affect the town's communal rights, and it mentioned specifically the intermunicipal rights between Huétor-Tájar and the city of Loja (Guarnido 1969: 76). And an intermunicipal communal union could be made up of towns under the jurisdiction of several different lords. The intercommunal system of the city of Guadalajara, [64] for instance, included towns belonging to the count of Coruña, to Juan Hurtado de Mendoza, and to the princess of Eboli. ⁽⁷⁾

Intercommunalism even existed on an international scale. In 1559 the Castilian Cortes indicated that there had in the past been reciprocal pasture rights between Castile and Portugal. But the Cortes expressed dissatisfaction over the fact that Portugal had curtailed pasture rights for Castilian animals, whereas Castile continued to grant pasture rights to Portuguese animals, as before (Cortes: v, 818). It would be interesting to know more about this type of intercommunalism, and to know to what extent it also existed with France.
 
 

The flexible character of community property undoubtedly made it more valuable to the municipalities and to their citizens. But because much of this property could not be clearly defined as to type, and because the history of its acquisition was so often vague or clouded with illegitimacy, it was highly vulnerable to attack from sources seeking to erode the institutions of public ownership, or to exploit them for their own benefit. The problem was aggravated by the fact that there were conflicting laws regarding the use of community property in Castile. These conflicting laws - local and national - account for much of the trouble between individuals, town governments, the crown, and the Mesta. The communitarian tradition was able to maintain its vitality throughout the sixteenth century. But the tradition survived only because it had been staunchly defended, because for centuries it had been under attack from the nobility, the crown, the municipalities, and even from the very peasants who most benefitted from the system.

The most frequent and persistent attacks on community property came from the peasants who were using it. It is not difficult to understand how an individual who cultivated a plot year after year (remember the examples of long tenure) could ultimately come to think that his right to the plot should extend beyond a mere temporary occupancy. Each piece of land has a unique personality, depending on its soil type, surface irregularities, subsurface drainage, and other characteristics. And it often takes years of experimentation before a cultivator can understand its peculiarities sufficiently to derive the maximum benefit from it. Thus, there was a rational justification for a permanent occupation of the soil. In addition, there [65] must have been a certain emotional attachment of the cultivator for a field he had worked and coaxed to produce season after season. Because of these practical and psychological factors, the functioning of the institutions permitting individuals to use public lands produced a strong tendency to infringe upon the principle of public ownership, thus transforming the right of limited and precarious use into the right of extended use, and temporary possession into permanent possession.

Accordingly, in all parts of the two Castiles the tierras baldías used by peasants tended gradually to become treated as private property. A frequently used technique to encroach on public lands was for individuals owning adjacent lands to enlarge their own property by gradually moving the landmarkers (mojones) into the commons, or by gradually expanding into the commons by plowing an additional furrow or two every year. By the same token, the Castilian peasants made unauthorized use of the common montes, especially in the extraction of firewood, charcoal, and lumber. Each individual tried to take as much as he wanted, whenever he wished. And there was a similar tendency for the peasants to misuse the various types of communal pastures available to them (Vassberg 1980).

Members of the nobility also often encroached upon public property to try to enlarge their estates. The success of a municipality in resisting usurpations by such powerful persons varied greatly, depending upon the resources and the determination of the parties involved. A drawn-out litigation to attempt to recover usurped municipal lands might prove so costly that it would be considered better to forfeit the property. Some municipalities simply acquiesced in the usurpation of their lands by a powerful noble, apparently because they despaired of any positive results, or could not bear the costs, or from fear of retaliation, or simply out of respect. A law of 1435 (Novísima recopilación, libro VII, título XXI, ley III) tried to remedy this situation by making it obligatory for local councils to seek justice when their property was illegally taken, even if the usurpers were 'caballeros y personas poderosas'. But the conditions that had inspired the law were strong enough to cause it to be broken. Nevertheless, there are numerous examples of municipalities that were successful in using the courts to resist the nobility's attacks on their property. A suit brought by Morón de la Frontera (Seville) against the count of Viana was resolved in the city's favor by the Chancillería of Granada in 1552. But the legal battle took no fewer than eighteen [66] years, and the townspeople were so discouraged at one point that they nearly gave up the fight. ⁽⁸⁾

Another way the nobility contributed to the usurpation of public lands was to grant permission for vecinos to plow and even to hold as private property a part of the tierras baldías that had previously been available for public use. For example, in the mid-I500s the marquis of Villanueva gave the vecinos of the town of La Campana (Seville) his permission to clear parts of the local monte baldío to plant vines, olive trees, and grain. As a consequence, by the early I570s there were, dispersed in the montes of La Campana, over fifty patches that had been cleared and planted with the license of this noble. Sometimes a town council would join the lord in legitimizing the taking of parts of the tierras baldías. One such was the council of Espera (Cádiz), which joined with the duke of Alcalá to make grants of tierras baldías to local residents around the year 1530. ⁽⁹⁾

The municipalities and municipal officials were also often guilty of usurping public lands. It has already been noted that town councils would sometimes grant their vecinos parts of the tierras baldías. This can be viewed as complicity by the towns in the usurpation of public lands. On the other hand, it should be noted that under many circumstances, the granting of tierras baldías by a municipality was to the distinct advantage of the local community. The councils making such grants might have acted out of a desire to insure that the possession of those lands would remain with their own vecinos, because there often existed a lively competition between neighboring towns over the use of tierras baldías available for their mutual benefit. The Castilian municipalities saw the tierras baldías as lands to be used largely as they pleased. Although they normally reserved them for the common use, there were many municipalities that usurped lands from the tierras baldías to add to their propios. For example, the city of Ubeda (Jaén) was found in the mid-1500s to have usurped four or five thousand fanegas of baldíos for its propios, renting the lands out as arable. ⁽¹⁰⁾

It was not only the tierras baldías that the municipal governments granted to their vecinos. A few places (they were rare) granted their common lands in property to the vecinos using them, abandoning the communitarian system entirely, at least as far as cultivation was concerned. Such was the case of the town of Cabeza Arados (Ciudad Real), which adopted the system of private ownership in the mid 1550s. The documentary evidence provides no explanation for the [67] change. It might have been to avoid the complications of having to supervise the lottery system, or it could have been to satisfy the demands of the local citizenry. In any case, the town council continued to exercise control over the rotation schedule of those lands. ⁽¹¹⁾ The series of national laws dealing with the subject indicate that it was not an uncommon occurrence for municipalities to alienate their own lands. In 1329 and 1351 the monarchs Alfonso XI and Pedro I forbade local councils to sell or alienate their property. A law of 1515 reiterated the same principle. And the emperor Charles V repeatedly found it necessary to issue new versions of the law, showing that the abuse continued (Novísima recopilación, libro VII, título XXI, leyes II, VIII, IX).

Much more prevalent than the loss of community property through its sale by the council was its temporary loss to the community as a whole because of the high-handed and unfair actions of officials of the council. A royal ordinance of 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella ordered officials of all municipal councils in the realm to return to the municipalities whatever propios, lands, pastures, montes, dehesas, and whatever other things from the common lands or baldíos that they had unlawfully taken. And it ordered them not to take the said property any more, under penalty of loss of office and permanent ineligibility for another office in the council (Novísima recopilación, libro VII, título xxi, leyes IV). Earlier laws, of 1433 and 1436, show that council officials had been taking advantage of their position to rent for themselves the towns' propios at cheap rates (Novísima recopilación, libro VII, título XVI, leyes IV). But the evil persisted in spite of the laws designed to eliminate it. And the situation was made worse by the crown's sale of municipal offices in the last half of the sixteenth century.

The Cortes of 1576 complained to the monarch that sales of the office of regidor (administrative official) were causing a hardship on the poor. The offices were bought by wealthy individuals, and whereas the town councils had previously acted to protect community property from despoliation by powerful private interests, when those private interests had bought their way into the local government, they could effectively manipulate it. Control of the town council enabled them to gain for themselves the use of community property. And the poor people were left with no remedy for this oppression, because the rich controlled the election of alcaldes (chief municipal officials), to whom they ordinarily would have [68] turned for help, and they had no money to employ the existing alternative remedies for the situation. Despite the importunities of the Cortes, the crown took no action at the time (Actas: v, 23-4), and the abuse continued and worsened. The Cortes of 1586-8 again complained to the monarch that the sale of offices had allowed the buyers to become lords of the towns, and that they were able to take for themselves the propios, firewood and common lands, and even to usurp the crops of individuals, leaving the poor with no recourse. At the request of this Cortes, Philip II promised not to sell any more offices 'except in cases of necessity', and to allow the local councils to repurchase for themselves the offices that the crown had sold (Actas: IX, 402-3). Unfortunately, the 'necessity' of Philip II was chronic; and the sales and the abuses continued.

Yet, despite abuses by unscrupulous municipal officials and despite usurpations by peasants and nobles, the communitarian system in sixteenth-century Castile generally was able to maintain its viability. The abuses were numerous and glaring, and they took their toll over the century. Moreover, during the reign of Philip II the crown developed a new fund-raising program (described in chapter 6) which was highly prejudicial to communitarianism. Nevertheless, on the whole, the system continued to function more or less well, thanks to the weight of tradition and thanks to the force of local and national laws protecting it.

The municipalities adopted ordinances, submitted to the crown for its approval, regulating the use of their various commons and propios. The local rules for community property comprised a part of the general municipal ordinances. However, places with especially valuable property of a special nature would usually gather into one collection all the regulations governing that particular thing. For example, Trujillo (Cáceres) had its monte ordinances, as did Andújar (Jaén). La Puebla de Montalbán (Toledo) had its monte cutting ordinances, and the city of Soria adopted a special set of ordinances for its new (following fires or massive cuttings) montes. The various municipal ordinances specified the exact fine to be levied for each infraction of the rules. For instance, the new monte ordinances of Soria included a complicated schedule of fines for various types of animals, in various sized herds, who entered the monte during its vulnerable early growing period: for bovines, horses, mares, or mules - 20 mrs per head by day and 30 by night; for asses - 5 mrs per head by day and 10 by night; for sheep - 1 mrs for up to 100 head, and [69] for over 150 head it was 150 mrs by day and 300 mrs by night; and so on. From time to time the municipalities would modify their fine schedules, usually to increase them as they were made obsolete by inflation or by other changing conditions. Some penalties were extremely harsh -- the reader might remember from earlier in this book that Cáceres had an ordinance specifying a hundred lashes and six years in the galleys, in addition to damages, for cutting down or burning trees in its montes. ⁽¹²⁾

Not only did the municipalities punish those who harmed the monte, some places even took steps to promote the reforestation of denudated areas. The city of Trujillo had laws giving it the authority to compel the vecinos of its Tierra to plant and maintain new montes. ⁽¹³⁾ Beginning in 1539 the city of Zamora sponsored the planting of thousands of trees (mostly poplars and pines) to restore its common woodlands - a program which was continued into the seventeenth century. And the council of the small village of Alvala (in Toledo province near the confluence of the Tajo and the Guadarrama) organized the planting of acorns in the mid- 1560s to restore an oak monte in its territory. The extensive pine groves (pinares) between the Duero and the Sierra de Guadarrama were begun in the late fifteenth and in the sixteenth centuries. Pine was preferred over broadleaf trees because it was fast growing and because its resinous branches made it less susceptible to damage by livestock (García Sanz 1977: 32; Domínguez 1973b: 160-1; Hopfner 1954: 415).

Many examples can be found of municipalities who were quite heroic in the defense of their community property, even in the face of unfavorable odds. In 1584 the governor of the powerful duchy of Feria ordered the town council of Salvaleón (Badajoz) to give a license to the warden (alcaide) of the local fortress to permit him to build pig pens and to cut firewood and lumber in one of the town's common dehesas. The council balked at the order on several grounds: first, the alcaide had not been granted vecino status (although he had lived there for two years); furthermore, the alcaide owned so many livestock that their presence in the dehesa would be prejudicial to the interests of the other vecinos; and finally, it was against the town's ordinances for anyone to build pig pens in that dehesa. When the council refused the license, the governor threw all the councilmen in jail. But they continued to withhold their assent, and appealed to the Audiencia (Supreme Tribunal) of Granada, which ordered them released. A suit resulted, and in 1586 the Audiencia ruled in favor of [70] the town, despite a protest and an appeal from the duke. The settling of grievances through the courts was so lengthy, expensive, and uncertain that some councils resorted to violence to achieve quick justice. In 1563, for instance, the council of the village of Puebla de Azaba (Salamanca) rang the bell for a town meeting. And when the vecinos had assembled in front of the church, the council organized a party of some thirty men to tear down a wall of a certain building on municipal property, and to remodel the structure for use as the village corral. The owner of the demolished building protested vigorously, and brought suit against the village, but in the meanwhile the village had its corral. ⁽¹⁴⁾

The municipalities appointed guards to protect their community property and to denounce violators of ordinances governing its use. There were many local variations in the names for these guards. In most places they were called guardas del campo (guards of the countryside), a title general enough to cover a broad jurisdiction. Some places called them simply guardas, or alcaides del campo (wardens of the countryside), or if they were mounted they might be called caballeros del campo. For more specialized duties there were guardas del monte, also called guardas montaneras, montaneros (foresters), or caballeros de sierra (mounted foresters). In parts of Extremadura, the foresters were called montarazes or guardas dela montarazia. Another specialized title was meseguero or mese quero, also called mese querodel pan or guarda de la meseguería, named after the mies (ripe grain) which these guards were to protect. And there were guardas del verde (of the green), whose task was to protect pasture.

The municipal guards watched over not only community property, but also private property, to keep animals from damaging crops, and to ensure that derrota rights were being observed. The guards, who were normally selected annually by the municipal council, had to swear by the cross and by the saints to uphold the local ordinances, and to discharge their duties honorably. In some cases the positions were auctioned, or rented each year to the highest bidder, who would then have a right to a specified percentage of the fines collected that term. This was true of the city of Trujillo, where the task of policing the montes was assigned to two mayordomos: one de cortos y quemas, in charge of cutting and burning violations; the other de la montarazia, charged with supervising the acorn harvest. Each mayordomo had a number of city-paid guards and constables (usually called guardas and alguaciles, but sometimes fieles and corredores) to do the actual [71] patrolling, both on foot and on horseback. During the acorn season, the city would also send out its councilmen and other officials to help the regular guards (Vassberg 1978: 52-3). When the guards discovered a violation, they would report it to their mayordomo, who would denounce the violator to the city government. Unless the accused contested the charge, the city would levy a fine with no further hearing, according to the rates specified in the municipal ordinances. Occasionally the guards would arrest the guilty party and bring him to the town jail. Far more common, however, was for the guards to confiscate some or all of the animals involved in the violation, and to herd them back to the town corral, where they would be held in lieu of fines, pending the resolution of the case. Such seized animals were called prendas (security to guarantee payment of the fine). The security could also be inanimate objects (called prendas muertas) such as tools (used, for example, in illegal cuttings), blankets, weapons, and articles of clothing or other personal effects. If animals were seized as security, the town's justice officials might agree to exchange them for some inanimate object valuable enough to cover the amount of the fine. Impounded animals would not be released, however, until a fee was paid for their keep, because it could be quite expensive to supply them with feed and water. ⁽¹⁵⁾

The smaller municipalities would not need a special mayordomo to supervise their guards. In Arjona (Jaén), for example, the guards were required to report violations in person to the scrivener (escribano) of the town council, who would inscribe the information into the municipal records. It was the practice in Arjona for the guards to collect a fine on the spot, and for the town council additionally to assess a like amount against the violator. If the violator failed to pay this amount, the town officials would confiscate some of his property to sell in public auction to raise the necessary amount. The ordinances of Arjona stipulated that the town's guards were to make the rounds of all the properties of the territory at least once a week. And to make sure that they were diligent in policing the private property of the area, the ordinances required the guards to report any damage to the owner within three days, under pain of paying the damages themselves, plus a fine of 100 mrs. Being a guard was a difficult business, since it involved both diurnal and nocturnal vigilance. And in some cases it involved spending several days and nights in the field. For instance, the city of Soria had six guards to police its new montes. These were supposed to provide a continuous surveillance over the [72] area. Every Friday three of the guards would go into the city to make a report of damages and fines while the other three remained in the field guarding the montes. The following week it would be their turn to report. Thus, each trio of guards would report to the city government every two weeks; the rest of the time, presumably, they were on duty out in the montes. ⁽¹⁶⁾

Not all fines were monetary. A widely used fine was the quinto, literally a fifth of the intruding herd or flock, but often moderated to only a tenth, or even less. There were many variations to the quinto. In Soria, the full quinto was enforced against hogs or goats who damaged the new monte, but it was not applied at all to horses, cows, or other larger animals, who paid a monetary fine instead. And even in the case of hogs and goats, if less than five animals were involved in the violation, the quinto could hardly be assessed, so a monetary fine was levied in its place. In some places, the idea of a proportionate fine was dropped in favor of a stipulated number of animals for each flock involved in a violation. The ordinances of Trujillo, for instance, set a fine of two head from each flock of sheep illegally entering the city's caballerías by day, and four head if by night. And there were places where the quinto was no longer collected in kind, but was computed in money instead, although the old term quinto was retained for the fine. ⁽¹⁷⁾

As an incentive to the diligent reporting of violations, the guards were normally given a proportion of the fines they brought in, in addition to a salary. Each municipality had its own formula for this. In Soria, two-thirds of the fines went to the city treasury, and one third to the guard who reported the infraction. The one-third share for the guard was a widely followed practice. In Trujillo, however, in certain cases the guard received only one-fifth of the fifth (quinto, of animals) brought in by him. And in Arjona, the guard's share was one-half of each fine up to 400 mrs, with everything in excess of that amount going to the town. If the guards were not prompt in making arrests or in reporting violations, they might lose their share of the fines, because most municipalities' ordinances allowed ordinary private citizens to report infractions of the law and to receive a percentage of the fines, if the guards failed to do so within a reasonable length of time. The ordinances of Andújar (Jaén), for example, gave the person who denounced unreported violations a quarter of the fine; and in Trujillo, the denouncer received a one-third share. What was the income of a municipal guard? I have seen only one [73] reference to a salary: that one was for one of Trujillo's guards, who was paid 3,740 mrs for five months' salary in 1594, which amounts to 25 mrs per day. ⁽¹⁸⁾ If that guard received a substantial additional amount as a share of fines (which was not made clear in the document I used), his income would probably have been considerably above that of the average rural inhabitants with whom he came into contact; because, according to the Relaciones, the average daily income of vecinos in the neighboring province of Toledo was less than 38 mrs, and in certain poor regions it was below 12 mrs (Silva 1967: 28-42).

The municipal guards had a difficult task. The town councils realized this, and employed many devices to try to ease their burden. One widely used scheme was the organization of the fields of the locality into compulsory blocks or districts (hojas or pagos) where everyone would plant, or fallow, according to the same rhythm. This system had important advantages over the alternative subdivision of the territory into tiny parcels of mixed planting and fallow: since all the planted fields were together, it was easier to protect the crops from grazing animals; and since all the fallowed fields were together it made herding and pasturing animals more efficient. Hence, in many places it was forbidden to plant outside the designated block for that year. Many towns also established planting zones for vines and orchards. Some municipalities made planting in these pagos obligatory; others provided protection (by local ordinances, and the guards to uphold them) only for those crops planted within the special areas, and disclaimed responsibility for any damage done to fields on the outside (García Fernández 1964: 142-3; García Sanz 1977: 30-4). Another aid to maintaining the integrity of crops was the widely followed practice of organizing all the animals of a place into a single herd, which could be more easily watched than many tiny groups of wandering animals. Still another expedient was to require the animals of a place to wear bells. I do not know how widespread the requirement was, but the ordinances of Arjona (Jaén) of 1537 stipulated that each yoke of oxen or cows taken to places where they might cause damage had to wear a bell (cincirro - the modern spelling is cencerro) 'with its clapper not stopped up', and likewise each flock of sheep or goats had to have audible bells (esquilas y cincirros) that would ring to indicate where the animals were going, to make it easier to avoid damage to crops and other things. The animals of El Burgo (León) also wore bells. ⁽¹⁹⁾ [74] The guards experienced all sorts of difficulties in dealing with malfeasants. In 1589 a guard of Molina de Aragón (Guadalajara) testified that he was having considerable trouble apprehending violators of the law along the border of the neighboring kingdom of Aragón, because the local people conspired with their friends and relatives across the border so the latter could avoid capture and fines. The guard told of one such incident: he was about to seize a certain flock of Aragonese sheep illegally pasturing in his territory, but before he reached the herd he heard the voices of Castilian shepherds calling out to warn their Aragonese friends that the guards were coming, upon which the violators fled with their animals across the border, where they were safe from capture, being out of his jurisdiction. Sometimes the guards (like law enforcement officers throughout history) were physically attacked. In 1549, for example, the guard of the little village of La Revilla (Burgos) found a flock of several hundred sheep illegally grazing in the local dehesa boyal. He immediately went to assess a fine or to take some animals as security. But the sheep, which were from a neighboring village, were being watched by a couple of brothers who had a huge mastiff which they set on the hapless guard. The dog kept the guard at bay long enough for the brothers to escape with all their sheep. After that, to the mortification of the guard, the brothers went around bragging that they could graze their sheep anywhere they wished with impunity, because their vicious dog would take care of the guard. ⁽²⁰⁾

The danger of physical attack could also come from humans, of course. A forester of the city of Soria discovered this in 1528. In the early morning one day in March the forester and a helper apprehended a herd of over thirty cattle illegally pasturing in the monte. The cattle were being watched by a boy, but he fled when the guards appeared, so they began herding the animals to the city's corral, as security for a fine. But they did not get far, because the boy had run to fetch the animals' owner, a violent type who galloped up on horseback fulminating curses and insults, and threatening the guards with a lance and a sword so that they finally had to abandon the cattle and flee themselves. And in Arjona (Jaén) armed lawbreakers caused so much trouble for the guards that an ordinance was adopted in 1537 making it illegal for anyone herding animals to carry 'a lance, spear, goad, dagger, crossbow, cutlass, or any other arm except a knife (cuchillo corvo), on pain of the loss of the weapon and a fine of [75] 200 mrs'. But one questions whether the ordinance actually deterred malfeasants from bearing arms. ⁽²¹⁾

Most municipal guards seem to have performed their duties conscientiously. But guards were not saints, and some fell into the temptation of taking advantage of their position of power. Some abuses of authority were merely the result of excessive zeal, or punctiliousness. Another understandably widespread abuse was for the guards to show favoritism, particularly to municipal councilmen (who appointed them and paid their salaries). Inevitably, there were also charges of brutality, both in the handling of human prisoners and in the treatment of animals. The guards of the city of Toro, for example, were accused of the unnecessary use of manacles to bring in prisoners. And on one occasion the guards of Serradilla (Cáceres) seized about a dozen cattle and put them in the town corral, where they were reportedly kept without food or water for three or four days. Many allegations of brutality were undoubtedly exaggerated, but the charge in the case of Serradilla has the ring of truth, because one cow died. Another common abuse was bribery. A guard who apprehended a violator might insinuate that it would be cheaper to pay a small bribe than to pay the fine. If the suggestion for a bribe was initiated by the violator rather than by the guard, the effect would be the same: the guard would be richer, the municipal treasury would be poorer, the depredation of property would go unpunished, and respect for the law and its enforcers would be undermined. ⁽²²⁾

The temptation for the guards to accept, or even to demand bribes was much greater in those places where the guards got their offices through competitive bidding. In 1566 it was reported that the guards of Chinchilla de Monte Aragón (Albacete) publicly acknowledged that they paid as much as they did for their position only because they knew that they could recoup their investment by accepting bribes. Unfortunately, it was not only the guilty who made illegal payments to guards. There is considerable evidence of extortion: unscrupulous guards would intimidate the innocent into paying bribes (or protection money) to avoid the nuisance and expense of having to defend themselves against trumped-up charges. This sort of abuse led an indignant vecino of the village of Adobe (Guadalajara) to say of the guards of nearby Molina, 'They are not guards, but thieves. . . who come not to guard. . . but to see what fines can be [76] levied; and not only do they exact fines, they also make the peasants give them grain, and salt pork (tocino), and cheeses, and other things.' ⁽²³⁾ Such flagrant misconduct, however, must surely have been extraordinary. Most guards lived, with their families, in small towns and villages. In that setting, they would have been under constant scrutiny by the local community, and there would have been powerful social pressures for them to conduct themselves honorably, even in the absence of official restraints.
 
 

Periodically, the municipal governments would order an inspection tour (visita de términos or visita de inspección y amojonamiento) of the boundaries of the locality's territory. There were two major concerns in these inspections: first, that the integrity of the various municipal properties was being maintained; and second, that the dividing line separating the territories of different municipalities had not been altered. Territorial and property boundaries were marked in various ways. The boundaries often followed easily identifiable natural features such as rivers, unusual rock formations, or large trees. But these were not always available, so man-made boundary markers were also used. Buildings, walls, or corrals could serve the purpose, but the most widely used artificial landmark was the stone mojón (marker). At regular intervals the council of a municipality would appoint a boundary committee, who would make the rounds checking the landmarks, straightening them if necessary, and replacing them if they were missing. When inspecting the boundary between one town and another, it was customary for the boundary committees from the two municipalities to meet, and to check jointly the landmarks of their common boundaries, and of the intermunicipal commons shared by them. The composition of these municipal inspection committees normally included two councilmen (regidores) and the local corregidor or his lieutenant. Castillo de Bobadilla (1608: II, 946-8) recommended that the corregidor should make the inspection tour in person when the boundaries of commons and propios were to be rectified, because the full weight of his authority would be needed against those powerful interests who so often were guilty of usurping municipal property. Neither the corregidor, nor his lieutenant, nor the councilmen who made these inspection visits were paid a special salary, nor did they get their meals paid while performing this [77] service, because it was considered to be a regular part of their duties. The inspection tours were normally made during seasons when there was no urgent work to be done in the fields. In fact, it was illegal to make them during the harvest months of June, July, and August, so as not to disturb the peasants during this crucial period. The spacing of inspection tours varied from place to place. The Cortes (Actas: y, 123-4) recommended annual inspections, and even called for holding back part of the salary of corregidores and municipal officials who failed to make yearly tours. Nevertheless, many places did not think it necessary to perform the task so frequently. ⁽²⁴⁾ Trujillo, for example, had its inspections only once every six years (Naranjo 1922-3: 355-6).
 
 

Despite ordinances and guards to enforce them, despite periodic inspection tours, and despite fines and other penalties, many municipalities discovered that they were unable to deal successfully with usurpations of their commons and propios. Even when a town took vigorous action against malfeasants, the effort was frequently wasted, because the usurper would simply reoccupy the same lands at the earliest opportunity, leaving the town still despoiled of its lands, and the poorer for its fruitless investment of time and money. In the Cortes of Toledo of 1480 the municipalities requested the crown's assistance in dealing with such usurpations. The result was the Law of Toledo (1480), which remained the basic instrument of royal protection of community holdings throughout the next century. This law was designed to make it possible for municipalities to recover their lost property despite the resistance of powerful local interests, who themselves were often guilty of the usurpations. The Law of Toledo ordered corregidores and other royal justice and investigative officials to receive complaints from the municipalities about usurped property. The official was to act as an extraordinary judge, summoning the accused parties to prove within thirty days the legality of their possession. In the meanwhile, the judge would undertake an investigation using witnesses and written evidence. At the end of the thirty days, he was to pronounce his verdict, and if he found that the municipality had indeed been despoiled of its property, he was to make immediate restitution. The law stipulated that if the convicted usurper resisted the order of restitution on the basis of spurious legal claims, he was to forfeit not only his claim to the [78] property, but was also to be divested of any royal or local governmental post. And if he had no such office, he was to have one-third of his property confiscated for the crown. If the investigation proved that the usurper had possessed no legal claim whatever to the property in question, he was to be fined twice its market value. The law further contained safeguards designed to keep usurping parties from hiding behind extended litigation, and it designated the royal council of finance as the sole court of appeal (Novísima recopilación, libro vn, título xxi, leyes II, v).

The practical application of the Law of Toledo proved that more time was needed for investigation, and that pending litigation could be a problem. Consequently, the law was amended to allow seventy days for resolving cases, rather than the original thirty. A case was to be suspended if it was discovered that there was previously initiated litigation pending on the property, and was to be turned over to the magistrate before whom it was pending. But the matter of pending litigation proved to be a troublesome loophole through which usurpers of community property could maintain their illegal possession and impede the resolution of charges against them. A new law of 1552 attempted to eliminate this loophole by providing for the restitution of usurped property despite appeals if the legal claim to the land post-dated the year 1542. It further ordered magistrates to personally resolve any pending litigation, unless it was pending before one of the Chancillerías. This sealed one loophole, but opened another. Now the favorite method of resisting the Law of Toledo became to tie up the property in litigation at the Chancillerías, and despite the combination of local and royal efforts, it remained difficult to enforce the Law of Toledo (Novísima recopilación, libro vu, título xxl, leyes VI, VII).

Municipalities with especially frustrating land problems could petition the crown to send a special magistrate with legal training and experience (un juez que fuese de letras y experiencia) to help them enforce the law. The monarchs of Castile had been providing special agents for boundary cases for over a generation before the passage of the Law of Toledo. But after the passage of that law the commissioning of such magistrates became more and more commonplace. They were called jueces de términos (boundary magistrates), and were dispatched at the request of a municipality, with a royal commission specifically to enforce the Law of Toledo. Badajoz received such a magistrate in the 1480s (Rodríguez Amaya 1951: 445-59), Córdoba [79] had one in the 1530s, and so on. The boundary magistrates, who were individuals with the licenciate or the doctorate, were aided by a special scrivener (escribano) attached to the commission, and sometimes also by a prosecutor (fiscal-alguacil). The salaries of all these boundary commission officials were paid out of the fines levied by the commissioner against violators of the Law of Toledo. In places where there were many cases to hear, the royal boundary commission might have to sit for many months. For instance, the commission for Jerez de la Frontera began operating in late 1551, and did not conclude until March of 1553. But even the best efforts of the royal boundary magistrates could not permanently halt the usurpation of municipal property. ⁽²⁵⁾ Castillo de Bobadilla (1608: II, 947) wrote 'I never saw the place where most of the rich had not violated [the Law of Toledo] many times, nor did I ever see anything more commonplace than for each of them to take community property for himself, nor did I ever see such a lack of enforcement of the infinite number of remedies that are provided to correct the situation.'
 
 

No discussion of the communitarian system of Castile would be complete without a section devoted to the role of the royal Mesta (association of livestock owners). The privileges of the Mesta are well known, thanks to Julius Klein's classic study (1920) of the organization. Hence it is not necessary to spend much time repeating them here. The Mesta's cañadas (especially designated trails for transhumant flocks and herds) could be used by local as well as by migratory animals. They were regarded as common lands, but they were exclusively for pastoral purposes, and could never be plowed. There were many conflicting laws about the Mesta, and the attitude of the municipalities toward its seasonally moving flocks varied, depending upon local pasture resources, the size of local herds, and the strength of the local government. The montes and baldíos were opened to the Mesta flocks by the earlier royal charters of the organization. However, the term baldío was ambiguous, and some towns were able to assert their authority over the local baldíos, insofar as they used them as local commons. During the Middle Ages the local commons - as distinguished from the tierras baldías and realengas - were usually recognized as being reserved for the use of local cattle. As long as the pressure on local pasture resources was slight, there [80] were no grave problems over grazing rights. There was litigation over the question of Mesta access, but the towns generally were successful in establishing their rights. But as the size of herds increased, and as the Mesta grew in power, its itinerant judges (alcaldes entregadores) became ever more bold and arrogant in their treatment of local inhabitants and local governments. And by the beginning of the 1500s the Mesta flocks were regularly invading town commons, even such special pastures as the dehesas boyales and carniceras (Klein 1920: 92-3).

The monarchs of Castile, particularly Ferdinand and Isabella, increased the privileges of the Mesta because of the association's importance to the lucrative external wool trade. An infamous law of 1501 declared that all lands upon which the migrant flocks had ever grazed were to be reserved in perpetuity for pasture, and could never be used for any other purpose - a measure clearly detrimental to arable agriculture. This pro-Mesta policy was continued by the first Habsburg ruler: in 1527 a royal decree stipulated that local governments could not deny their commons to the Mesta flocks, and that if the flocks damaged cultivated fields, the stock owners would be liable only for damages, and not for fines or for other 'vexations'. The Mesta was at the height of its power during the reign of Charles V, its flocks numbering some three and a half million head. These animals and the Mesta judges were undoubtedly the source of much misery for the local people with whom they came into contact. Many a grain field was ravaged, many a peasant was unfairly harassed, and many a local pasture was stripped by the invading flocks (Huetz 1967: 637; Gómez Mendoza 1967: 501-2, 508).

This high-handed treatment spurred an intense anti-Mesta reaction on the part of the towns and the peasants. At the same time, around mid-century, the crown stopped favoring the organization as it had before: the Castilian economy had become more complex after the opening up of the American market, and wool had lost its preeminent position to grain, wine, and olive oil. The Cortes now assumed an increasingly anti-Mesta posture, and the Chancillerías began handing down decisions that tended to favor the extension of agriculture at the expense of the old pastoral prerogatives. And for various reasons, the number of animals in Mesta flocks dropped to around two million head by the end of the sixteenth century. The final step in the reduction of the power of the Mesta came as a result of the conditions placed on the monarch by the Cortes before it [81] agreed to approve the servicio de millones (special tax to rebuild the Armada after the debacle of 1588). The Mesta judges lost most of their power, and the importance of the stock owners' association was greatly diminished (Actas: y, 246).

Because of the nature of the organization, the Mesta had an adversary relationship with agriculturalists living alongside its routes. The Mesta saw the plow as a threat to its cañadas and pastures, and local peasants saw the Mesta flocks as a menace to their fields, vineyards, and orchards. It is tempting to describe the resulting conflicts as being the manifestation of a natural animosity between stockmen and farmers. There was undeniably a sustained antagonism between the owners of migratory flocks and the local agriculturalists of the areas through which they passed. But this was not, strictly speaking, an arable-pastoral conflict, because the typical Castilian peasant had both cultivated fields and animals. The grain farmer needed animals for draft power, meat, dairy products, and wool and leather; and the stock raiser needed fields to provide grain for his bread. For the peasant, then, there was a complementary, rather than an antagonistic, relationship between stock raising and arable agriculture. The derrota de mieses and the dehesa boyal are proof of this complementary relationship. The intruding Mesta flocks, however, disrupted the local equilibrium. They competed with local animals for pasture, and the conflicts which ensued engendered countless legal battles. In fact, much (if not most) of the litigation between the Mesta and local interests reflected not a pastoral-arable conflict, but rather a rivalry between local and transhumant pastoralism.

For example, throughout the late 1400s and the entire 1500s the city of Trujillo maintained a running feud with the Mesta, whose animals wintered in the area. In the year 1500 the Chancillería of Granada resolved in favor of the city a suit over whether or not the migratory herds had the right to pasture gratis in Trujillo's common dehesas. In the same year Trujillo agreed to allow the Mesta herds free passage in the Berrocal (a rocky area) adjacent to the city, so long as they entered one day and left the following day. If the animals lingered beyond that, they could be fined by the city for trespassing. The Mesta regularly secured the pasture rights it needed through rental agreements with Trujillo, but there continued to be trouble over conflicting interpretations of local ordinances and Mesta privileges. In repeated confrontations with the Mesta, the city acted arbitrarily, subjecting the shepherds and their flocks to various forms [82] of harassment. The Mesta defended its ancient prerogatives as best it could, but its star was on the wane: the Chancillería often ruled against it. The Mesta frequently complained that sheep and shepherds were being mistreated by officials from Trujillo. There were numerous examples of deliberate plowings of Mesta trails and pastures, and of the usurpation of Mesta pastures. The city and its vecinos acted in an arrogant and overbearing manner toward the Mesta, often getting the best of it through deception, through brute force in the field, and through legal maneuvers in the courts. ⁽²⁶⁾

Trujillo, of course, was an extraordinarily powerful (and litigious) city. Smaller and weaker municipalities were less likely to fare well against the Mesta. In 1586, for instance, the Chancillería of Granada ruled that the town of Monroy (Cáceres) had to allow Mesta animals pasture rights in its dehesa boyal. And in 1590 the town of Navacerrada (Madrid) lost a case before the Chancillería of Valladolid, in which it had tried to exclude Mesta animals from an ejido. But other small municipalities were victorious against the Mesta, especially in the second half of the century, as in the case of Aliaguilla (Cuenca), which in 1591 won from the Chancillería of Granada recognition of its right to keep Mesta flocks from using its three dehesas boyales. And as the century neared its end, some small municipalities felt confident enough to treat the Mesta in a high-handed, arrogant manner. For example, in 1583 the council of Arnedo (Logroño) suddenly voted to increase its fines tenfold, and it ordered the decapitation of animals illegally invading the pastures and fields of its territory. ⁽²⁷⁾

Some historians, awed by the spectre of Mesta excesses during the zenith of the association's power, have concluded that early modern Spanish agriculture was ruined by depredations of migratory flocks. But that is simply not true. It is likely that only a minority of Castilian peasant farmers ever had their crops damaged by Mesta flocks. Furthermore, the available evidence clearly indicates that arable agriculture was generally victorious over pastoral interests in the sixteenth century - overwhelmingly so during the reign of Philip II. Nearly all of the lawsuits that I have seen between the Mesta and agriculturalists originated because of illegal plowings of cañadas, dehesas boyales, or other areas that traditionally had been reserved for pasture. The evidence that I have seen, in suits in the two Chancillerías and in the Mesta archive, suggests that the Mesta was tenacious in the defense of its traditional pasture rights, even when [83] the bias of the courts was distinctly in favor of the expansion of cultivation. But members of the Mesta seem to have been normally quite willing to pay damages and fines when their animals strayed into established cultivated fields. The baldíos constituted a grey area, claimed as pasture by the Mesta, and claimed as potential arable by land-hungry peasants. And it was the question of new cultivation in the baldíos that generated most of the antagonism between the Mesta and agriculturalists, and most of the legal battles between the two. ⁽²⁸⁾
 
 

By now it should be amply clear to the reader that the communitarian system in sixteenth-century Castile was not merely a decrepit vestige of the medieval past, nor was it a local aberration restricted to a few isolated districts that were out of tune with the rest of the country. Rather, it was a vital part of the fabric of society. But exactly how important was it? Unfortunately, that question is difficult to answer. We know that the towns described in the Relaciones rarely lacked community property. The Relaciones show that Castilian villagers of the late 1570s found the different forms of public ownership to be highly beneficial, and of great importance to their economic welfare. They never thought that they had too many commons or propios, but rather tended to want to increase them in size and number. Many towns bought, or even rented property for this purpose. And the villagers always lamented any loss or contraction of their common privileges. This strong popular attachment for the communitarian system is hardly surprising, for the system sustained both stock raising and cultivation, and constituted a keystone of the social and economic structure of rural life. But the dependence of a Castilian municipality on community-owned property varied greatly from one place to another. It would be splendid to be able to present here a set of accurate statistics breaking down municipal territories of various regions into privately owned and public lands, with subdivisions of the latter into various categories for comparative purposes. But unfortunately, it is not possible to do so: the surviving quantitative information is incomplete, geographically spotty, and of inconsistent quality. It seems that most places had a hybrid property structure in which private property and public property coexisted. The structure could be very complicated: a hypothetical town could have a juxtaposition of seigneurial property, ordinary private [84] property, municipal property of various kinds, and intermunicipal property. The crown lands added an additional complication, and do not forget that even 'private' property was subject to public use through the derrota de mieses, and other practices.

One must be cautious in interpreting documentary assessments of the proportion of community-owned lands of a place, because to sixteenth-century Castilians virtually every field in a territory was 'public' and 'common' through the derrota de mieses. This can easily lead to misconstruction or exaggeration. For example, a local historian, writing in the mid-twentieth century about the old landholding system of Badajoz ,concluded that virtually all of the territory of the city consisted of communal lands, because the 'private property' rights in the area were essentially limited to the right to plant and to pasture on the lands, and even these were subject to limiting restrictions (Rodríguez Amaya 1951: 438).

We know that there existed some villages where there was little community property, and where nearly all the land was in private hands (Vassberg 1974: 400-1). But this seems to have been highly unusual. According to the Cortes of Madrid of 1563 (Actas: 1, 331) it was 'notorious that the baldíos and other public and common lands were the most important thing that the towns had for their sustenance and preservation'. Now, it must be admitted that the Cortes were often guilty of hyperbole. However, it seems quite clear that there were many places where most or even all of the land in the locality was indeed community property of one sort or another. For example, in 1584 a royal magistrate conducted an investigation that showed that in the town of Castrillo (apparently Castrillo la Guareña, in Zamora province) nearly the entire territory was common or baldío. During a similar investigation in the village of Brincones (Salamanca) a sexagenarian vecino of the place testified that the entire territory was common pasture for local livestock, except for one small plot of about a fanega in area. And the vecinos of Castroverde de Campos (Zamora) reported in 1584 that they had nothing with which to sustain themselves but their periodically allotted common arable lands. A similar situation existed in the village of Piedras Albas, in the province of Cáceres near the Portuguese border. There the vecinos reported that their only livelihood was growing grain, and the only lands they had for this purpose were tierras baldías. Even down in Málaga province, the vecinos of Teba claimed that all the lands in the territory were 'public and municipal and common and baldíos'. ⁽²⁹⁾

[85] Even if we allow for exaggeration, there can be little doubt concerning the dominant role of the communitarian system in the aforementioned places. But even in other towns, where community property represented only a minority of the total resources, its impact could nevertheless be tremendous. Where there were common arable lands, everyone could attempt to improve his standard of living by farming them. The exploitation of even a small amount of community land could significantly advance the well-being of a peasant with marginal property resources of his own. Consider the example of the town of Quesada (Jaén). The municipal government supervised the use of a large block of arable baldíos, which the vecinos of the place could freely use in lots of up to 10 fanegas. Unfortunately, we do not know what percentage of the town's territory these baldíos comprised, but in 1569 the population of Quesada was 1,400 vecinos, of whom about 800 were independent peasant farmers (labradores). And over 700 of these peasant farmers -- practically all of them -- had lots in the baldíos, thus benefiting from the free use of those lands. In Villarramiel de Campos (Palencia) there existed a similar situation. In 1584 the town boasted some 1,340 obradas of common arable lands that were allotted for life to all the resident married vecinos of the place. In this instance, we know that these particular commons made up about a quarter of the area of the local territory. And much of the remaining three-quarters must have also been community property, in the form of pastures, ejidos, and so forth. ⁽³⁰⁾

It is commonplace for documents dealing with common lands and baldíos to stress the importance of the fact that no rent needed to be paid for their use. Quite clearly, that was one of their most attractive features -- they allowed the ordinary peasant, who had meager resources, to utilize lands without having to worry about either rent or the responsibility (and expense) of land ownership. One can find abundant documentary evidence from all parts of Castile indicating that these lands were exploited in preference to privately owned lands, precisely for that reason.

The communitarian system was considered to be an essential part of Hispanic society. Therefore, when the Americas were colonized, it was considered perfectly natural that the various institutions of public ownership, like other institutions of the Castilian motherland, should be transported to the New World (Fabila 1941: 8, 13, 15). It would be fascinating to study the fate of the transplanted propios, ejidos, dehesas boyales, and other types of community property in the [86] exotic setting of the western hemisphere, particularly as they interacted with pre-existing native institutions. But here we can only mention the transatlantic voyage of the Castilian institutions as proof of their vitality and of their importance to the Spanish culture of the day.
 
 

Although the communitarian system suffered many vicissitudes, and although it sustained attacks from various sides (about this, more later), the system was too deeply rooted in the habits and in the economy of rural Castile to be quickly eradicated. The mid-eighteenth-century Catastro de Ensenada, which was the first comprehensive statistical survey of the nation's resources, showed that community property was still very much alive. In the district of La Armuña (Salamanca) twenty out of thirty-three towns and villages still had common arable lands (Cabo 1956: 119-23). And in the Subbético district of the province of Córdoba, every town had propios and commons, about a quarter of which were in arable, and the remainder in pasture (including monte). In that district, the town of Priego alone owned 12,730 fanegas of community lands scattered in about twenty different blocks (Ortega Alba 1973: 634-6). And up-river, in the neighboring province of Jaén, the municipalities had also retained large amounts of propios and commons. Little Baños de la Encina had 14,000 hectares - an impressive legacy for a village of only a couple of thousand inhabitants (in 1595 it had 1,336, and was probably not much larger in the mid-1700s) (Higueras 1961:121-77). The Catastro revealed that over half of the land in the territory of Salduero (Soria) was common (1,451 yugadas out of 2,500), but most of this was monte or dehesa boyal. Most of Salduero's cultivated land was privately owned, although the town did own 20 fanegas of arable (García Terrel 1958: 25-5, 109-12). And in the Corregimiento of Cáceres there were 242,205 fanegas of baldío commons (in monte) out of a total area of 488,196 fanegas (Martín Gil 1938: 36). The proportion of community property in the mid-1700s was undoubtedly much lower than it had been back in the sixteenth century, because the general trend, for centuries, had been toward the individualization of land ownership.

The decisive blow in the destruction of Spanish communitarianism [87] came in the nineteenth century, with the state-directed disamortization of ecclesiastical and municipal lands. The disamortization process revealed the existence of numerous municipalities where the totality of the territory was still collectively owned, with no private property other than houses and adjoining garden plots. Joaquín Costa (1944: 250-83) cited numerous such villages between the Duero and Tormes rivers (Zamora) in Old Castile. And in the Sierra de Urbión (Soria) there were still a number of villages subsisting almost exclusively on the exploitation of community-owned forests. Costa even found some villages in southern Spain where the land was almost l00 percent communal. In Extremadura, as the disamortizations began, the little village of Almaraz (Cáceres) still had about 800 fanegas of arable commons which were divided into 80 lots and periodically apportioned among the vecinos of the place (Corchón 1963: 258-9, 311-12). And in the province of Almería, a count revealed that over 99 percent of the live oak trees of the area were still common, rather than privately owned (Toro 1849: 257-64). All this was before the state-directed forced disamortization of commons. But even after the expropriations there remained some living fragments of the communitarian past, mainly in isolated mountain zones that had escaped the notice of the government, or that were considered to be too trifling to worry about. Near the end of the nineteenth century Costa found villages that still practiced the periodic distribution of common arable land in several places in Old Castile. And he wrote (1944: 250-83) that the custom of the free use of community lands (baldíos) for the plowing was still in use in many areas, including La Mancha, Andalucía, Asturias, Navarra, and Cataluña. The poor, isolated villages of the Campo de Aliste (Zamora) had also been able to retain many of their communal customs, and had retained some of their lands, despite the disamortizations (Méndez 1900: 35-74).

One would think that by the mid-twentieth century the progressive evolution of society would have caused the vestiges of the communal past of a bygone era to have completely disappeared. Not so: a surprising number of the old customs have survived. The most basic is the collective right to use forests and pastures, and this custom persists in many parts of Spain, particularly in the mountains of the north (Hoyos 1947: 18-23). An outstanding - though certainly not typical - example of communal survival is the village of La Aldea del Puente (León). Here community property is not a marginal residue but still an element of prime importance. In 1970 it occupied 46 percent of the local territory, and included forest, grazing land, and arable. The derrota was even still observed there (Ferreras 1971: 71). Elsewhere in the province of León there still exist mountain villages organized into intermunicipal unions with shared pasture rights in certain areas. And the village of Llánaves (León) in the 1950s continued to practice the periodic division of arable lands, following precisely the centuries-old custom (Martín Galindo n.d.: 7-26).

The La Armuña district of Salamanca province also had villages still employing the old periodic allotment of common arable, although the amount of land had dwindled to a fraction of its former size. In La Armuña common rights to acorns and firewood were also still observed in the 1950s (Cabo 1955: 412-13). The geographer Antonio López Gómez (1954: 566) studied the surviving agrarian collectivism of the mountain village of Valdelaguna (Burgos) in the 1950s. He found that the village made allotments of common arable every eight years, of parcels organized into two pagos (planting districts) which were sown alternatively in a biennial schedule (the time-honored año y vez). The derrota de mieses was still followed, not only on the communal fields, but on private plots as well. About 15 percent of Valdelaguna's community lands were arable; about 35 percent was in pine forest; and most of the remainder was pasture. These proportions show that the local economy was highly dependent on the pastoral sector and on the exploitation of the local forests - a situation that probably had not changed appreciably since the Middle Ages. In another area, the Campo de Arañuelo (made up of parts of Cáceres, Toledo, and Avila provinces), the old community ownership seemed to have vanished, but there were reminiscences of the old system in the current separation between cultivation rights and pasture rights to the same plot of land. Frequently, one person farmed the land, but a different person rented pasture rights to it for the period when it lay fallow - purchasing what had once been a common right through the derrota (Corchón 1963: 260).

In the mid-twentieth century, even in those areas where communal ownership was still important, it was losing ground to the institution of private ownership. The reason is that private ownership provides a far greater incentive to invest the capital needed for improvements to bring about higher yields. Because of this, in most areas (the Tierra de Sayago district of the province of Zamora is a good example) (Cabo 1956: 637-9) the communal property is now limited to [89] mountainous or forested areas, and the survival of these is sometimes due to the intervention of the national government, which has declared them to be 'of public utility'. It should be mentioned that the state has also encouraged another type of collectivism: by 1969 there were 224 agricultural cooperatives operating in the eight provinces of Old Castile. They had about nine thousand members, and cultivated nearly four million hectares of land. But this represented only 2.65 percent of the total cultivated land of the area. Ironically, the government, having once forcibly disamortized communal lands, now finds itself faced with considerable resistance to the idea of giving up individual land ownership to join a cooperative (García Fernández 1970: 5-9).
 
 

Spaniards, and Hispanists, are fond of proclaiming that Spain is different. It is unique, of course, but community property was by no means peculiar to Castile. Similar practices and institutions existed in most of Europe from medieval times down to the nineteenth century. This is not the place to study the details of the property holding systems of the rest of Europe. But there, as in Castile, the extent of public ownership and public control varied widely from place to place. As one would expect, Portugal had a communitarian system quite similar to that of its neighbor to the east. And many of the same institutions can also be found in France and Italy. But the communitarian system was not limited to Latin Europe: the Celtic and Germanic areas -- Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia -- also had their commons and other customs that in many instances were remarkably like those in Castile. And the collectivist tradition of eastern Europe is well known. In all these areas, communal practices thrived and decayed at different periods, depending on local conditions. Noble and peasant usurpations were everywhere a problem, as was royal covetousness. Nevertheless, the communitarian tradition seems to have remained generally strong until the mid-eighteenth century, after which most governments began encouraging a transition to private ownership, on the grounds that the change would bring about an improvement in agriculture. ⁽³¹⁾

1. Alonso de Tordesillas v. Villaconejos (1543-50), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 34.

2. Toro v. La Bóveda (1542), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 60.

3. Osma v. Berzosa (1549), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 67.

4. Cardenete v. Yemeda (1588-90), ACHGR, 3-1142-3; Cazorla y. La Iruela (1562-3), ACHGR, 3-1424-1,. The map, made for the purpose of requesting a purchase of jurisdictional rights, is undated, but located among documents from the 1500s, and seems to be from that period. The original map can be found in AGS, CJH, 24 ant. (14 mod.).

5. Averiguación de la Tierra del Vino (1558), AGS, EH,360; for an example of the use of the phrase 'rejas vueltas', see Cea v. Valderaduey (1545), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 63; Campo de Criptana v. Alcázar de Consuegra (1534) ACHGR, 511-2255-2.

6. The quote about Talamanca is in a letter to the crown from Diego de Carbajal (no date but 1569), AGS, CJH, 65 mod. (94. ant.). See also a transcript of a meeting of the council of Trujillo, 22 September 1536, AAT, 1-3-78, no. 1.

7. Averiguación de la Tierra del Vino (1558), AGS, EH, 360; Daganzo v. el Colegio de la Compañía de Jesús de Alcalá (1591), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 72; Trujillo y. Don Juan Alonso de Orellana (1570-1608), ACHGR, 3-443-3. In 1567 the alcalde mayor of Andújar (Jaén) said that his city had gained substantially in population thanks to immigration from nearby villages under seigneurial jurisdiction. The attraction of Andújar was its many communal rights. See Averiguación de Andújar (1567), AGS, EH, 220.

8. In Iscar (Valladolid) the alcaides (governors, or wardens) of the fortress of the count of Miranda illegally took for themselves the use of several pieces of common land, and the vecinos did not resist, out of fear and respect, according to Relación de Diego López de Ayala, 21 August 1584, AGS, CJH, 215. See also papers relating to a suit brought by Morón de la Frontera against Don Juan Téllez, the count of Viana, and his son Don Pedro Téllez Girón, the duke of Osuna (a copy from 1739 of documents from 1534-52), AHN, Osuna, 822, no. 9.

9. La marquesa de Villanueva v. La Campana (1576), ACHGR, 3-417-1; Venta que el Licenciado Chávez hizo a Fernando Giles [de tierras en Espera], 11 August 1588, AGS, CR-7, 3258; Relación del Bachiller Juan de la Concha, 28 June 1569, AGS, CJH, 94.

10. Relación de Juan de la Concha (no date, but apparently from 1564), AGS, CJH, 54; Relación de Bernardino de Barros, g September 1573, AGS, CJH, 84 mod. (124 ant.).

11. Venta que el Licenciado Garci Pérez de Bazán otorgó a la villa de Cabeza Arados, 3 May 1590, AGS, CR-7, 3260.

12. Ordenanzas de montes de Trujillo (1499) can be found in AM, Executorias, Trujillo, 16 December 1521; those of Andújar in AGS, EH, 220; Ordenanzas de la corta in Averiguación de Puebla de Montalbán (1529), AGS, EH, 400 Ordenanzas de Monte Nuevo de Soria (1518) in Soria v. Francisco de Vinuesa, ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 44 and the Cáceres information in Pueblos del Margen v. Juez de Residencia (1572), ACHGR, 508-1945-1. The modification of an inadequate penalty is described in Plasencia v. Diego Nieto (1564), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 25.

13. Trujillo v. las villasy lugares de su Tierra (1552-1631), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 54.

14. Salvaleón v. Francisco Durán y el Alcalde Mayor del Estado de Feria (1585-7), ACHGR, 3-269-3; La Puebla v. Antonio Hernández (1563), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 67.

15. Donhierro v. Rapariegos (1528), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 33; Toro v. La Bóveda (1526), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 1; Rejas v. Don Pedro Zapata (1565), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 56; Valdespinoso v. Aguilar (1526), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 46; Badajoz v. Talavera (1569), ACHGR, 3-1570-12.

16. Ordenanzas de Arjona (1537), AGS, EH, 223 Ordenanzas de monte nuevo de Soria (1518) in Soria v. Francisco de Vinuesa, ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 44.

17. Trujillo v. Don Juan Alonso de Orellana (1570-1608), ACHGR, 3-443-3-3.

18. Soria v. Francisco de Vinuesa (1518), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 44; AM, Executorias, Trujillo, 16 August 1548; Cuentas de propios de Trujillo (1594), AAT, 1-2-66, no. 1; Ordenanzas de Arjona (1537), AGS, EH, 223; Ordenanzas de montes de Sierra Morena (1537, from a copy made in 1575), Averiguación de Andújar, AGS, EH, 220; Hernán Pérez v. Trujillo (1588-9), ACHGR, 3-1298-2.

19. Lucas Alonso Cabrera v. Arcos (1548), ACHGR, 507-1863-3; Ordenanzas de Arjona (1537), AGS, EH, 223; El Burgo v. Villamonyo (1545) ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 14.

20. Averiguación de Molina (1589), AGS, EH, 220; Mesta v. Revilla (1549), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 22.

21. Soria v. Francisco de Vinuesa (1528), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 44; Ordenanzas de Arjona (1537), AGS, EH, 223.

22. Santos Hernández v. Guardas de Toro (1537), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 71; Luis Alonso Cabrera y consortes v. Arcos de la Frontera (1548), ACHGR, 507-1863-3; Toro v. La Bóveda (1542), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 60; Badajoz v. Talavera (1569), ACHGR, 3-1570-12; Serradilla v. Mesta (1576), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 41.

23. Averiguación de Alpera (incl. Chinchilla) (1566), AGS, EH, 219-13 Visita de la ciudad de Trujillo, año de 1585, AAT, 1-3-82, flo. 54; Averiguación de Montefrío (1558), AGS, EH, 323; Averiguación de Molina (1589), AGS, EH, 209.

24. Congosto v. Ahumada (1537), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 3; Visita de la ciudad de Trujillo, año de 1585, AAT, 1-3-82, no. 54.

25. Información testifical a instancia de la ciudad de Córdoba (1568), ACHGR, 3-1511-l0; Sevilla v. La duquesa de Besar (1539), ACHGR, 3-1123-4; Don Lope Sánchez de Valenzuela v. Jaén (1526-39), ACHGR, 3-420-6; Jerez de la Frontera v. diversos vecinos de ella (1551-3), ACHGR, 3-465-3. And see especially a transcription of a commission to the Juez de Términos Licenciado Juan del Castillo, original dated 8 February 1535, in a suit between Juan Jimnez and Córdoba (1535-7), ACHGR, 508-2083-II.

26. AM, Executorias, Trujillo, 11 July 1504, 16 December 1521, 16 August 1548, ,15 December 1589, and 31 July 1591; AM, Relaciones de los alcaldes entregadores, libro 5, folios 242v. ff (1565).

27. Monroy v. Mesta (1586), ACHGR, 3-947-13; .Alavacerrada v. Mesta (1590), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 5 Aliaguilla v. Mesta (1590-1), ACHGR, 508-2072-4; Arnedo v. Mesta (1585), ACHVA, PC, FA (F), 64.

28. Julius Klein, the Mesta historian, was conservative in assessing the impact of Mesta flocks on cultivated fields. See his The Mesta; A Study in Spanish Economic History, 1273-1836, Harvard Economic Studies, vol. xxi (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1920), pp. 336-42. An example of an inflated view of the Mesta's effect on agriculture can be found in Marcelin Defourneaux, Daily Life in Spain in the Golden Age, trans. Newton Branch (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), p. 10,.

29. Venta que el Licenciado Ortiz otorgó a Rodrigo Gallego, de tierras en Castrillo (no date but 1584), AGS, CG, 3254; Venta que el Licenciado Ortiz otorgó a Brincones, 24 August 1588, AGS, CG, 367; letter to the crown from Nicolás Muñoz, for the town of Castroverde (no date but 1584), AGS, CJH, 216; Averiguación de Piedras Albas (1575), AGS, EH, 906; Venta que el Licenciado Josephelaso otorgó a Andrés de Salamanca, por tierras en Teba, 25 June 1584, AGS, CR-7, 3260.

30. See three Relaciones from Bachiller Juan de la Concha about lands in Quesada, dated 30 May and 28 June 1569 (a third is undated, but clearly is also from 1569), AGS, CJH, 94 ant. (65 mod.).

31. An introductory bibliography for Portuguese agri-collectivism can be found in Angel Cabo Alonso, 'El colectivismo agrario en Tierra de Sayago', Estudios geográficos, 17, no. 65 (1956), 600-1, especially notes 15 and 16. The bibliography of European agricultural communitarianism is vast, but one can get an idea of the general trends from Jerome Blum, 'The European village as community: origins and functions', Agricultural History, 45 (1971), 157-78; Alejandro Nieto, Bienes comunales, Serie J, Monografías Prácticas de Derecho Español, vol. XL (Madrid: Revista de Derecho Privado, 1964), pp. 801-40; Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages, vol. 1 of The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 1966); Catherine Delano Smith, Western Mediterranean Europe; A Historical Geography of Italy, Spain, and Southern France since the Neolithic (New York: Academic Press, 1979), pp. 34, 36, 88-g, 243-52; and B. H. Shcher van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, AD 500-1850, trans. Olive Ordish (London: Edward Arnold, 1963), pp. 57, 72-4.