344
THE MESTA
towns as AlbarracIn, Daroca, and Teruel.1 This was part of the
general plan for centralization which had begun with the suppres-
sion of the uprising in Aragon and the extinction of its Cortes.2
The first two Bourbons were clearly intent upon taking a leaf
from the agrarian policy of the sixteenth-century autocrats, and
to that end they lost no opportunity to exploit the Mesta polit-
ically as well as economically.3 But the autocratic aspirations of
such well intentioned though not brilliant administrators as
Philip V and Ferdinand VI were far from adequate for the great
task of rehabilitating the ancient prestige of the graziers. The
rural life of the whole of Spain was being radically transformed,
and even the genius of a Colbert could not have turned back the
tide.
The country was in fact experiencing an agrarian awakening
which was strikingly like that occurring contemporaneously in
England. There the spread of the new industrialism gave strength
to the copyholder’s plea that the substitution of small scale farm-
ing for large scale grazing was the only solution of the country’s
food problem. So too in Castile, the population was growing
steadily under the fostering care of Bourbon mercantilism, and
the demands for arable land became more and more insistent.4
The older field or hσja systems, and particularly the antiquated
pasturage regulations, were impatiently brushed aside.6 Royal
licenses permitting enclosures of commons for cultivation were
acquired on all sides. In one investigation covering the period
ɪ Arch. Mesta, A-3, AlbarracJn, 1726. The way had been prepared for this by
a decree of Charles II, issued in 1693, giving the Mesta the right to enforce some of
its laws in Aragon.
2 The Spanish Cortes session of 1724 was the first to include the entire king-
dom, except Navarre, which had its own legislature until after the Napoleonic
wars.
3 Several of the privileges mentioned were conferred only after payments of
forced loans by the Mesta members. Cf. Arch. Mesta, Prov. iv, 9; Coneordia de
1783, i, fol. 84; and Brieva, Coleccidn, pp. 69, 71-72.
4 Rudolf Leonhard, Agrarpolilik und Agrarreform in Spanien unter Carl III.
(Munich, 1909), p. 258.
6 A good example of this trend from pasturage to arable during the first third
of this century is found in the Ordenanzas de Burgos (Madrid, 1747), pp. 149 ff.
A very fair and comprehensive statement of this change is also found in the famous
Memorial ajustado sobre Ios danos . . . la Agricultura (Madrid, 1784), pp. r44ff.
COLLAPSE OF THE PASTURAGE PRIVILEGES 345
from 1712 to about 1750, it was found by the dejected officials of
the Mesta that 173 towns in Castile alone had secured such per-
mits and had actually made use of them.1 With such widespread
inroads upon its pasturage, the final period of the Mesta’s exist-
ence seemed at hand, and the coming of Charles III to the Span-
ish throne in 17 59 hastened the end.
We have already noted the valuable experience which that
monarch had had in his Neapolitan realm in dealing with the
problems of a migratory pastoral industry.2 Within a year after
his accession it became evident that he proposed to use all the
powers of his enlightened despotism to settle this question of the
ancient hostility between Castilian herdsmen and husbandmen.
It also became clear at once that the settlement was not to take
the shape of a rehabilitated Mesta. After a preliminary adjust-
ment of certain pasturage quarrels between the migratory and the
sedentary flocks in Estremadura,3 the vital question of what was
to be done with the Mesta was taken up. In 1761 the Royal
Council began the work of agrarian reform by voting that munic-
ipalities had in every case the right to dispose of their own com-
mons.4 This brought forth an immediate protest from the Mesta,
and the struggle was on. Charles himself then took a hand and
authorized successively two exhaustive investigations of the
pastoral problem. The results of the first inquiry appeared in
1771. Those of the second, which was conducted by Charles’s
famous prime minister, Campomanes, senior member of the
Royal Council and therefore President of the Mesta from April,
1779, were published in two bulky volumes in 1783.5 These were
intended not as arraignments of the Mesta, but as presentations
of all the known facts regarding its past and present methods and
its effects upon agriculture. The hearings were fair and were
1 Arch. Mesta, Prov. iv, 6, 1742 ff. The investigation did not take up those
places “ where land was not actually cultivated and kept enclosed lor several
years.” Most of the 173 towns were in the southern and western pasturage areas.
i See above, pp. τ32, 293. 3 Brieva, Colecciin, p. no.
* Cos-Gayon, in Remsta de Espana, x, p. 8.
3 See below, p. 414. The Library of the Hispanic Society of America has several
broadsides of instructions issued by Charles IΠ to town officials, requiring the
presentation of evidence for these investigations.