Iθ8 THE MESTA
means of circumventing the annoyances of the itinerant justices
and no further protests were made.
One of the most insistent and repeated demands from the towns
was that for the residencia of the entregador. This was the name
applied to the reckoning which every public servant had to give of
his official acts at the close of his term of office : an opportu ity
for the presentation of complaints against him in the presence of a
superior authority. In the charter of 1273, the entregadores had
been instructed to attend at least one of the Mesta meetings each
year to give an account of their actions and to answer complaints
brought against them by the members.1 This mandate was re-
peated with some emphasis in subsequent charters and in the
agreement made in 1499 between the Count of Buendia, pro-
prietary entregador, and the Mesta. By this contract of 1499 the
entregadores were forbidden to leave the meeting place until the
sessions were concluded and justice done to every complaining
member.2
These arrangements were, however, only intended to provide
for the hearing of charges by Mesta members against their judicial
protectors. It was not until the anti-Mesta outbursts of the six-
teenth century that the towns demanded hearings at which all
complaints against entregadores might be presented. Beginning
as early as 1528, there were regular petitions in the Cortes that
the entregador be made to hold such hearings in the presence of
the town alcalde of each place along his itinerary.3 It was alleged,
and probably correctly so, that the majority of the complaints
against the Mesta’s judge came from wayside peasants who had
little or no opportunity to appear at the Mesta meetings in order
to complain to the President of the Mesta, the general supervisor
of the entregadores.4 In 1595, after many futile petitions, the
Cortes took matters into their own hands and elected one of their
members who should attend the Mesta meetings each year, “in
1 Quad, ιγ31, pt. i, p. 4.
, Ibid., pt. 2, p. 257.
s Cortes, Madrid, 1528, pet. 155, Segovia, 1532, pet. 54; Madrid, 1551, pet. ιoι.
Further details on the residencia 01 the entregador are given in Quad. 1731, pt. 2,
pp. 149, 153, 273, 292-293, and in the Nov. Recop., lib. 7, tit. 27, ley 5, cap. 32.
4 Cortes de Castilla, xiii, pp. 487, 504-506 (1595).
the Entregador and the towns
109
order to sustain the causes and charges of poor peasants, and to
report to the Cortes immediately whether they are being given
justice.” 1 This practice of delegating an inspector to represent
the national assembly and to protect the interests of the peas-
antry was continued from that date down to the abolition of the
office of entregador in 1796. The Cortes were thus enabled not
only to keep close watch upon the itinerant judges but also to
exercise a most effective supervision over the enactments of the
Mesta itself.2
As the attacks upon the Mesta became more aggressive, the
distance from which an entregador could summon culprits and
witnesses was also the subject of continued protest. In earlier
years there seems to have been no fixed limit to the size of the
entregador’s audiencia or district around the point where he was
holding court at any given time. There were complaints in the
fourteenth century that he frequently summoned persons forty
or fifty leagues. As a check upon such abuses of personal liberty,
it was proposed by the Cortes that no one be required to leave the
jurisdiction of his home town to answer the summons of an entre-
gador. This was granted by the crown, with the qualification
that citizens of larger municipalities (those having jurisdictions
extending more than sixteen leagues) could be compelled by the
entregadores to come as far as twenty-four leagues in answer to
summons. In the cases of inhabitants of smaller towns, the en-
tregador’s subpoenas were not effective outside of the sixteen
league radius.3 This arrangement appears to have been satisfac-
torily carried out for nearly two centuries, for there were no
further complaints either as to the location of the courts of the
entregador, or as to the extent of his jurisdiction, until the out-
break of the widespread agitations of the sixteenth century.
In the course of those agitations, the opponents of the Mesta
demanded that the entregadores should be allowed to hold court
only in the chief cities along their itineraries. It had long been
ɪ Cortes de Castilla, xiii, pp. 487, 504-507 (1505).
2 Concordia de 178j, ii, fol. 26 v. The delegate of the Cortes sat at the right of the
President at all sessions of the Mesta, whether secret ones or not, and had access to
all of its papers.
3 Cortes, Soria, τ380, pet. 22.