THE MESTA

days’ duration, one in the south, in January or February, and the
other in the north, in September or October. During the years of
waning prestige and of financial stringency, in the seventeenth
century, the herdsmen frequently held only one annual meeting,
and even that was once abandoned when the attacks of the
Cortes deputies became unusually bitter.¹ The places of meeting
were designated, in turn, by each of the four centres or head-
quarters of the Mesta: Soria, Segovia, Cuenca, and Leon. The
southern and southwestern towns in which the winter meetings
usually assembled were Villanueva de la Serena, where the Mesta
kept its archive in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Don
Benito, Siruela, Guadalupe, Talavera, and Montalban. In the
northern mountains the customary meeting places were Aillon,
Riaza, Aranda de Duero, Buitrago, Medina del Campo, Berlanga,
and Siguenza.² It was not until 1740 that Madrid became the
usual place for both winter and summer meetings, though the
Mesta archive had been transferred to that city about 1593. In
the middle of the eighteenth century the voluminous bundles of
the archive were transferred across the city from the church of
San Martin to the edifice on the Calle de las Huertas in which
they are housed today.³

The meetings were usually held in a church; but not infre-
quently they took place in the open fields, and for such occasions
an ingeniously constructed collapsible and portable altar was
carried. This contrivance and the accompanying silver service
are still employed for the mass read before the annual meetings
of the Mesta’s successor, the Asociacion General de Ganaderos del
Reino. The quorum of the sessions was forty, and the actual
attendance probably between two and three hundred. This was
only about a tenth of the herdsmen who were entitled to attend,
namely all who paid the royal tolls on migratory flocks. Women
sheep owners were often present, and were given all the privileges
of membership.

ɪ Arch. Mesta, Privs. Reales, leg. ι, no. ɪ (1273); Paris Bib. Nat., Res. Oa. i9θ
ter no. 46 (ι6ι6). See also below, pp. 119, 289.

^, See Map, p. 19. The meeting places from 1500 to 1827 are listed in Matfas
Brieva, Colec de Ôrdenes peτtenecienles al Ramo de Mesta, pp. viii-xxxi.

’ Cf. p. 403∙

INTERNAL ORGANIZATION OF TBE MESTA

j_n all things the votes of the body were taken by quadrillas or
groups. These were the four units into which the sheep owners
were districted around the leading pastoral centres of the northern
uplands — Soria, Segovia, Cuenca, and Leon. The quadrilla of
Sorfa included the bishoprics of Osuna, Burgos, Calahorra, Sig-
uenza, and part of Tarazona. That of Cuenca comprised the
bishopric of that city, and was later (1693) extended to include
the regions of southern Aragon, around Albarracin and Teruel.
The Segovian district was made up of the bishoprics of Segovia
and Avila, and of Valle de Lozoya, Real de Manzanares, and other
adjoining localities of less importance. The Leôn quadrilla in-
cluded the bishoprics of Le6n and Astorga. In these regions were
the homes of the transhumantes and their owners, the Mesta
members.¹ At the Mesta sessions each quadrilla met separately,
arrived at a decision upon every question to be brought before
the entire organization, and then expressed its position at the gen-
eral meeting through the quadrilla leader. The four leaders sat
two on either side of the President, with the one from Soria in the
position of honor at his right hand.² Occasionally one or more of
these quadrillas would take independent action without consult-
ing the general body.³

As is explained below,⁴ the right to vote in the quadrillas was
not qualified by any specifications regarding ownership of flocks
ɑf a given size, as was the case with the historic sheep owners’
gild of Saragossa. In spite of this liberality, however, the great
sheep owners among the nobility were occasionally able to bring
pressure to bear through the President of the organization, who

^x Bravo, Noticia sucinta, pp. 5-8. The royal privileges of 1273 and after made
the Mesta ostensibly include “ all sheep owners in the realm,” as will be pointed
out later. This attempt at universality did not, however, affect the fact stated
above regarding the habitat of the migrants.

’ Arch. Simancas, Mss. Diverses Castilla, no. 1643, is a carefully written opin-
¹°u of some Mesta attorney in J 566, in which the local mesta of Soria (see above,
PP∙ 9 ff.) is regarded as the model for the national Mesta. This may have been the
reason for the precedence which Soria enjoyed over the other quadrillas.

Arch. Mesta, Prov. ii, 38: a vote of a subsidy to the king by the quadrilla of
. eɑn in 1647 for certain favors. Ibid., i, 21 : measures taken by Segovia and Le6n
*^{n 1}4q8 in order to secure special concessions for their flocks at the royal toll gates.

^{4 See} P∙ 53∙

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