330
THE MESTA
is true that angry and occasionally effective protests were already
being made against that organization, but the herdsmen were still
in a position to enforce their extravagant pasturage claims, to
invade the forests, and to check the development of agriculture
and of sedentary sheep raising.
CHAPTER XVII
THE COLLAPSE OF THE MESTA’S PASTURAGE
PRIVILEGES
Pasturage legislation of Philip II. Decrees of 1566, 1580, and 1582. Futile agra-
rian programme. The Chancillerfas defend agriculture and enclosures. Opposition
of royal creditors and others to the privileges of the Mesta. Exploitation of the lands
of the Military Orders. Extravagant pretensions of the decree of 1633. Spread
of enclosures during the seventeenth century. Mesta propaganda against agri-
culture. Collapse of ancient pasturage privileges in the eighteenth century.
Culmination of the enclosure movement.
A cursory glance at the agrarian legislation of Philip II reveals
at first no essential difference between the position of the Mesta
under the second Hapsburg and that which it held during the
reign of Charles V. Philip followed in his father’s footsteps, with
more or less exaggerated confirmations of his predecessor’s pas-
toral enactments. He arrayed all the cumbersome and anti-
quated paraphernalia of his one-man government to defend the
Mesta and its pasturage against the spread of arable enclosures.
The views of practically all students of this period of Spanish
agrarian history1 have been based upon the texts of such sweep-
ing pro-Mesta edicts as those of 1566, 1580, and 1582. These
decrees respectively indorsed the Mesta members’ pasturage
rights as against all non-migratory sheep owners,2 restored to
pasturage all land newly tilled since 1560,3 and appointed royal
commissioners to fix pasturage prices.4 If these documents be
taken at their face value, then it must be agreed that the Mesta
had indeed gone steadily onward to greater triumphs, and was at
this time more than ever the despotic ruler of rural Castile.
When we come, however, to examine the actual administration
ɪ See Haebler, Wirtschaflliche Blute Spaniens, p. 24, n. 2, whose views have
been accepted by Ansiaux, Goury du Rosian, and others.
1 Concordia de 1783, i, fol 88.
’ Nuexa Recop., lib. 7, tɪt. 7, ley 23.
4 Arch. Ayunt. Cuenca, leg. 9, no. 9 (1582).
ʒʒɪ